He’s the One

Winning a Groom in 10 Dates

Cara Colter

Molly Cooper’s Dream Date

Barbara Hannay

Mr Right There All Along

Jackie Braun

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Winning a Groom in 10 Dates

About the Author

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

EPILOGUE

Molly Cooper’s Dream Date

About the Author

Dedication

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

EPILOGUE

Mr Right There All Along

About the Author

Dedication

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Copyright

Winning a Groom in 10 Dates

Cara Colter

CARA COLTER lives on an acreage in British Columbia with her partner, Rob, and eleven horses. She has three grown children and a grandson. She is a recent recipient of the RT Book Reviews Career Achievement Award in the “Love and Laughter” category. Cara loves to hear from readers, and you can contact her or learn more about her through her website: www.cara-colter.com.

In Loving Memory

Judy Michelle Moon

1949–2009

PROLOGUE

“I SEE you’ve lost the hippie hair and the face stubble and the earring, Sheridan.”

“Yes, sir.” Brand had been so deep undercover for so long, answering to his own name was difficult.

“You don’t even look like him anymore,” his boss said approvingly. “Brian Lancaster is dead. We made it look as if his private plane went down over the Mediterranean under suspicious circumstances. No one in what’s left of the Looey’s operation will be questioning why Mr. Lancaster wasn’t one of the twenty-three arrests made across seven different countries.

“Amazing work, Sheridan. None of us could have predicted this when you answered that ad on the Internet. You took FREES in a new direction.”

FREES, First Response Emergency Eradication Squad, was an antiterrorism unit made up of tough, highly disciplined men with specialty training. Brand, recruited right after his first tour of active duty with the marines, had physical prowess and a fearlessness that had made him a top vertical-rescue specialist. But it was that gift, along with his knowledge of languages, that had earmarked him for FREES.

Answering an Internet ad out of Europe that offered to buy highly restricted weapons had changed everything. Brand had found himself moving away from his specialty, immersed in a murky world where he was part cop, part soldier, part agent, part operative.

But it had taken its toll. The truth was, Brand preferred hard assignments as opposed to soft ones—assignments where training and physical strength came together in a rush of activity, in and out, and over. It didn’t mess with your head as much as the past four years had. He longed for the relative simplicity of being an expert at something as technical as rope rescue.

“Look, even though it looks like Lancaster bit the dust, we’ve got a bit of mop-up to do. Bit players, loose ends. You need to lie low for a while. Really low. As if you really did disappear off the face of the earth. Know any place to do that?”

Brand Sheridan knew exactly where he could do that. The kind of place where no one would ever look for the likes of Brian Lancaster. A place of tree-lined, shady streets, where no one locked their doors, and the scent of petunias cascading out of window boxes perfumed the night air. It was a place where the big excitement on Friday night was the Little League game in Harrison Park.

It was the place that had piqued his fascination with all things that took a man high off the ground, but it had also been the place his younger self couldn’t wait to get away from.

And the truth was, he dreaded going back there now. But he had to.

“I’ve got some leave coming, sir.” That was an understatement. Brand Sheridan had been undercover for four years. The deeper in he got, the less the assignment had lent itself to taking holidays.

He’d been so good at what he did, had achieved the results he had, because of his ability to immerse himself in that world, to play that role as if his life depended on it.

Which it had.

His boss was looking askance at him.

“I need to go home.”

The word home felt as foreign to him as answering to his own name had done.

“It’ll be safe there?”

“If you were looking for a hidey-hole, the place where someone like Brian Lancaster would be least likely to be found? Sugar Maple Grove would be it.”

“One-horse town?”

“Without the horse,” he said wryly. “On the edge of the Green Mountains, Vermont. As far as I know, they still have a soda fountain and the kids ride their bikes to school. The big deal is the annual yard tour and rose show.”

He hesitated. “My sister has been in touch. She’s afraid my dad’s not coping very well with the death of my mother. I need to go see if he’s okay.”

Not that his father would appreciate it. At all.

“Your mother died while you were out, didn’t she?”

Her pride and joy the fact her yard had been on that annual tour of spectacular gardens, that her roses had been prize-winners. “Yes, sir.”

“I’m sorry. I know we weren’t able to bring you in when it happened.”

“That’s the nature of the job, sir.” And only people who did that job, like the man sitting across from him, could fully get that.

His father, the small-town doctor? Not so much.

“Good work on Operation Chop-Looey,” his boss said. “Exceptional. Your name has been put in for a commendation.”

Brand said nothing. He’d lived in a shadowy world where you were rewarded for your ability to pretend, your ability to betray the people you befriended and led to trust you. Getting a commendation for that? At this point he had mixed feelings about what he had done and about himself. One of those feelings definitely wasn’t pride.

He didn’t really want to go back to Sugar Maple Grove. His father was angry, and rightfully so. His sister had given him an unsavory assignment.

So, at the same time Brand Sheridan dreaded going back there, he was aware something called him that he could not run from anymore…

“I should be able to wrap up what I need to do in Sugar Maple in a week, two tops.” Brand asked.

“Let’s give it a month. That will give us time to put some protective measures in place for you.”

A month in Sugar Maple Grove? He hadn’t expected to stay that long. What on earth was he going to find to do there for a month?

But Brand Sheridan didn’t have the kind of job where you argued with the boss.

“Yes, sir,” he said, and to himself he thought, maybe I’ll catch up on my sleep.

Chapter One

STARS studded an inky summer sky. Bright sparks drifted upward to dance briefly with fireflies before disappearing forever. It was the perfect night to say good-bye.

“Good-bye,” Sophie Holtzheim said out loud. “Good-bye foolish romantic notions and dreams.”

Her voice sounded small and lonely against the stillness of the night, the voice of a woman who was saying farewell to the future she had planned out so carefully for herself.

Sophie was in her aging neighbor’s backyard. She was taking advantage of the fact he was away for the night to utilize his fire pit, though the absolute privacy of his huge yard and mature landscaping had irresistible appeal, too.

Sophie’s own house, in this 1930s neighborhood of Craftsman-style homes, was next to this one, on a Sugar Maple Grove corner lot. Despite a barrier of thick dogwood hedges surrounding her property, she did not want to risk a late-night dog-walker catching a glimpse of a fire burning…or of a woman in a white dress muttering to herself.

Let’s face it: when a woman was wearing her wedding dress, alone, at midnight on a Saturday, she wanted guaranteed privacy. And reprieve from the small-town rumor mill.

Sophie Holtzheim had fueled that quite enough over the past six months!

Taking a deep breath, Sophie smoothed a hand over the white silk of her wedding gown. She had loved it instantly, with its simple spaghetti straps, non-dramatic V-neck, fabric floating in a subtle A-line to the ground.

“I am never going to walk down the aisle in this dress.” She hoped to sound firm, resolved, accepting. She hoped saying it out loud would help, somehow, but it didn’t.

Sighing, Sophie opened the lid of the box beside her, and contemplated its contents.

“Good-bye,” she whispered.

It was a wedding-in-a-box. Inside were printer’s samples of invitations and name plates, patterns for bridesmaids’ dresses, magazine cuttings of flower arrangements and table settings, brochures for dream honeymoon destinations.

Sophie forced herself to pick up the invitation sample that sat on the very top of the bulging box.

“Don’t read it,” she ordered herself. “Just throw it in the fire.”

Naturally, she did no such thing. In the flickering light of the bonfire she had roaring in Dr. Sheridan’s stone-lined pit, she ran her hand over the raised cream-colored lettering of the printer’s sample. It was the invitation she had selected for her wedding.

“This day,” she read, “two become one. Mr. and Mrs. Harrison Hamilton invite you to join them in a celebration of love as their son, Gregg, joins his life to that of Miss Sophie Holtzheim…”

With a choking sob, Sophie tossed the invitation into the fire, watched its ivory edges turn brown and curl before it burst into flame.

Gregg was not joining his life to Miss Sophie Holtzheim. He was joining his life to Antoinette Roberts.

For the past few months Sophie had held out hope that this was all going to get better, that Gregg would come to his senses.

But that hope had been dashed this afternoon when she had been handed a brand-new invitation, with Antoinette Roberts’s name on it. Instead of hers.

It wasn’t a wedding invitation, but an invitation to an engagement celebration at Gregg’s parents’ posh estate on the outskirts of Sugar Maple Grove.

“Gregg and I were engaged. We never had an engagement party.” Sophie felt ridiculously slighted that all stops were being pulled out for the new fiancée.

It was the final straw and set the tears that had been building all afternoon flowing freely. She was glad she hadn’t applied any makeup for her good-bye-hopes-and-dreams ceremony!

How could Claudia Hamilton, Gregg’s mother, do this to her? Sophie was the one who was supposed to be marrying Gregg. It was too cruel to invite her to the engagement party where all of Sugar Maple Grove would be introduced to the woman Gregg had replaced Sophie with!

But his mother, who had once pored over the bridal magazines with Sophie, had made her motivations very clear.

“It can’t look like we’re snubbing you, dear. The whole town is going to be there. And you must come. For your own good. Your split was months ago. You don’t want to start looking pathetic. Try not to come alone. Try to look as if you’re getting on with your life.”

Meaning, of course, it was way too obvious that she wasn’t.

“We can’t have the whole town talking forever about Gregg breaking the heart of the town sweetheart. It will be bad for his and Toni’s new law practice. It’s really not fair that he’s looking like the villain in all this, is it, Sophie?”

No, it wasn’t. This whole catastrophe was of Sophie’s own making.

“If only I could take it back,” she whispered, as she rubbed a fresh cascade of tears from her cheeks. If only she could take back the words she had spoken.

She relived them now, adding fuel to the fire in front of her in the form of a picture of a wedding cake, three tiers, yellow roses trailing down the sides.

“Gregg,” she’d said, as he was heading back to South Royalton to complete law school, and pressing her to set a date for their wedding, “I need some time to think.”

Now she had her whole life to think, to mull over the fact she had thrown everything away over a case of cold feet.

The truth was Sophie had thought she’d known Gregg as well as she knew herself. But she could never have predicted how Gregg would react. She had pictured him being gently understanding. But in actual fact, Gregg had been furious. How dare she need time to think about him? And who could blame him really?

The Hamiltons were Sugar Maple Grove royalty.

And Sophie Holtzheim was just the sweet geek whom the whole town had come to know and love for putting Sugar Maple Grove on the map a decade ago as a finalist in the National Speech Contest with, “What Makes a Small Town Tick.”

Even years after she’d shed the braces and glasses, Sophie had never quite shed her geeky image.

So, naturally, she’d been bowled over when Gregg Hamilton had noticed her.

If he seemed a little preoccupied with how things looked to others, and if he had always been more pragmatic than romantic, those could hardly be considered flaws.

Especially in retrospect!

But it hadn’t been those things that bothered her. It had been something else, something she couldn’t name, just below the surface where she couldn’t see it, identify it. It had niggled, and then wiggled, and then huffed, and then puffed and then, finally, it had blown her whole world apart.

Because when she couldn’t ignore it for one more second, when her stomach hurt all the time, and she couldn’t sleep, she had told Gregg, hesitantly, apologetically, I can’t put my finger on it. Something’s wrong. Something’s missing. And she’d slid the huge solitaire diamond off her finger and given it back to him.

But nothing could have prepared Sophie for the startling swiftness of Gregg’s reaction. He had replaced her. Rumors that Gregg had been dating a new girl around the campus had found their way home within weeks of her returning his ring.

Sophie had thought he was just trying to make her jealous. Surely what they’d had was not so superficial that Gregg could replace her within weeks?

But today, hand-delivered confirmation had come that, no, he wasn’t trying to make her jealous. She really had been replaced. It was no joke. He was not on the rebound. He was not going to realize that Antoinette, beautiful and brilliant as she might be, was no replacement for Sophie. Gregg was not going to come back to her. Ever. An invitation to an engagement party could not be rationalized away.

It was final. It was over. Over.

Claudia had instructed her not to become pathetic. Was it too late? Was she already pathetic? Was that how everyone saw her?

If Claudia Hamilton could see Sophie now, conducting her druidlike ceremony, hunched over her box of dreams in a dress she would never wear again, it would no doubt confirm the diagnosis.

Pathetic. Burning up her box of dreams, reliving those fateful words and wondering what would have happened if she had never spoken them…

“I am not going to that party,” she said, out loud, her voice strong and sure for the first time. “Never. Wild horses could not drag me there. I don’t care how it looks to the Hamiltons.”

There. She relished her moment of absolute strength and certainty for the millisecond that it lasted.

And then she crumpled.

“What have I done?” she wailed.

What had she done?

“I wanted to feel on fire,” she said mournfully. “I threw it all away for that.” She sat in the silence of the night contemplating her rashness.

Suddenly the hair on the back of her neck rose. She sensed him before she saw him. A scent on the wind? An almost electrical change in the velvety texture of the summer night?

Someone had come into the yard. She knew it. Had come in silently, and was watching her. How long had he been there? Who was it? She could feel something hotter than the fire burning the back of her neck.

She turned her head, carefully. For a moment, she saw nothing. And then she saw the outline of a man, blacker than the night shadows.

He was standing silently just inside the gate, so still he didn’t even seem to be breathing. He was over six feet of pure physical presence, his stance both alert and calm, like a predatory cat, a cougar.

Sophie’s heart began to hammer. But not with fear. With recognition.

Even though the darkness shrouded his features, even though it had been eight years since he had stood in this yard, even though his body had matured into its full power, Sophie knew exactly who he was.

The man who had wrecked her life.

And it wasn’t the same man whose name was beside hers on a mock-up wedding invitation, either.

It was the one she had thought of when she’d made that fateful statement that she needed some time to think. That something was missing.

Oh, she hadn’t named him, not even in her own mind. But she had felt a longing for something only he, Brand Sheridan, wayward doctor’s son, wanderer of the world, had ever made her feel.

She knew it was ridiculous to toss her whole life away on something that had begun whispering to her when she was a preteen, and had become all-consuming by the time she was fifteen years old.

But there was no substitute for that feeling. It was like the swoosh in the pit of your stomach when you jumped off the cliff at Blue Rock. There was a thrilling suspended moment after the decision to go and before you hit the ice-cold pool of water, where you felt it. Intensely alive. Invigorated. As if that one glorious moment was all that mattered.

Brand had made her feel that. Always. She’d been twelve when her family had moved in next door to his, he’d been seventeen.

Just setting eyes on him had been enough to make her whole day go as topsy-turvy as her insides. Filled with a kind of wonder, and an impossible hope.

Sophie had loved the man who stood behind her in the darkness as desperately as only a young teen could love. She had loved him un-realistically, furiously, unrequitedly.

The fact that she had been only the teeniest glitch on Brand Sheridan’s radar had intensified her feelings instead of reducing them.

She felt the familiar shiver in her belly—the damn something missing—when he spoke, his voice rough around the edges, sexy as a touch.

“What the hell?”

She knew his eyes to be a shade of blue that was deeper than sapphire. But in the shadows where he stood, they looked black, sultrier than the summer night, smoky with new and unreadable mysteries.

For a moment she was absolutely paralyzed by his puzzled gaze on her. But then she came to her senses and lurched to her feet.

This was not how Brand Sheridan was going to see her after an eight-year absence! Pathetic.

Sophie scrambled toward the safety of the little hole in the hedge that she could squeeze through, and that she hoped he couldn’t—or wouldn’t. She would have made it, too, if she hadn’t remembered the damned box.

She wasn’t leaving it there for him to find, a box full of her romantic notions, as ridiculously unrealistic as a princess leaving a glass slipper for her prince to find.

The rest of the town might know she was pathetic, still think of her affectionately as their sweet geek—a romantic catastrophe now adding to her reputation—but she could keep it a secret from him.

She turned back, grabbed the box and then, disaster. She tripped over the hem of a dress she had left too long in the hope it would make her look taller and more graceful as she glided down the aisle.

Sophie crashed to the ground, face-first, and the box sailed from her hands and spilled its contents to the wind. Papers and pictures scattered.

He moved toward her before she could find her breath or her feet.

And then his hand was on her naked shoulder, and he turned her over. And she gazed up into his face and felt the sizzle of his hand on the tender flesh of her shoulder, whatever had been missing between her and Gregg bubbled up so sweetly in her it felt as if she had drunk a bottle of champagne.

He stared down at her, his brow furrowed, his expression formidable and almost frightening. This was Brand?

And then the hard lines of his face softened marginally. Puzzlement knitted the line of dark brows. “Sweet Pea?”

She drank in his face. Still a face that could stop the sun, but a new dimension to it, the lines cast in steel, his eyes colder, she thought, dazed. Something in his expression that had never been there. Haunted.

His hand moved from her shoulder, he brushed a smudge of something from her cheek.

It would be way too easy to mistake the leashed strength in those hands for all kinds of things that it wasn’t.

Just taking care of his awkward-situation-prone little neighbor, as always. Picking her up and dusting her off after yet another catastrophe. Her love for him giving her an absolute gift for clumsiness, for downright dumbness, for attracting mishap and mayhem.

She closed her eyes against the humiliation of it. The truth was, in those tender adolescent years after he had gone away and joined the military, she had imagined his return a million times. Maybe a zillion. The day he would come home and discover her. Not a gawky teenager with not a single curve, unless you counted the metallic one of the braces on her teeth.

But a woman.

She had imagined his voice going husky with surprise. Delight. Sophie, you’ve become so beautiful.

But of course, nothing ever went as she imagined it.

“Sweet Pea, is that you?”

She allowed herself just to look up at him, to drink in his scent and his presence and his mystery.

Brand Sheridan had always been crazy sexy. It wasn’t just that he was breathtakingly good-looking, because many men were breathtakingly good-looking. It wasn’t just that he was built beautifully, broad and strong, at ease with himself and his body, because many men had that quality, too.

No, there was something else, unnamable, just below the surface, primal as a drumbeat, that made something in Sophie Holtzheim go still.

If he had ever gone through an awkward teenage stage, she had been blind to it. Since the day she had moved in next door, Sophie had worshipped her five-years-older neighbor.

Laughter-filled, devil-may-care Brand Sheridan had always been too everything for sleepy Sugar Maple Grove. He’d been too restless, too driven, too adventure-seeking, too energetic, too fast, too impatient.

His father, the town doctor, had been conventional, Brand had defied convention. And his father’s vision for him.

To Dr. Sheridan’s horror, Brand had defied the white-collar traditions of his family, quit college and joined the military. He had left this town behind without so much as a glance back.

Sophie had rejoiced with his parents when he had returned safely to the United States after a tour of duty abroad.

When had that that been? Five years ago? No, a little longer, because he had been overseas when her parents had died. But, in truth, Brand had never really returned.

He had not come home, and to his mother’s horror, before they had really even finished celebrating his safe return from the clutches of danger, he had been recruited into an elitist international team of warriors known as FREES. For the most part, he lived and trained overseas or on the west coast. He worked in the thrum of constant threat, in the shadows of secrecy.

In those years away, Sophie was aware he had met his parents in California, in London, in Paris. She knew he occasionally showed up for family gatherings at his sister, Marcie’s, house in New York.

It had, over the years, become more than evident Brand Sheridan had left Sugar Maple Grove behind him, and that he was never coming back. He’d been unconvinced of the joys of small-town life that Sophie had once outlined in her national-speech-competition talk, “What Makes a Small Town Tick.”

Still, the whole town had felt the shock of it when Brand had not even returned home for his mother’s funeral. The framed picture of him staring out sternly from under the cap of a United States Marine uniform had disappeared from Dr. Sheridan’s mantel.

“Brandon,” Sophie said, suddenly flustered, aware she had studied him way too long. She used his full name to let him know she was prepared to see him as an adult and that they could leave the endearment, Sweet Pea, behind them.

“I wasn’t expecting you.” As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she regretted them. She always had a gift for saying exactly the wrong thing around him, as awkward as the Sweet Pea she was anxious to leave behind her.

Of course she wasn’t expecting him! She was in a wedding dress at midnight! If she’d been expecting him, what would she be wearing?

Well, a wedding dress would be nice, a part of her, the hopelessly romantic part of her she’d set out to kill tonight, said dreamily.

She shivered at the thought of Brand Sheridan as a groom. Glanced into the hard planes of that face and tried to imagine them softening with tenderness.

The tenderness she’d heard in his voice when he’d called her after the death of her parents. Aww, Sweet Pea…

That had been sympathy, Sophie reminded herself sternly. It was not to be mistaken for that stupid something she had tossed her life away for!

“Expecting someone else, if not me?” he asked.

He held out his hand to her, and she took it, trying to ignore another jolt of shimmering, stomach-dropping awareness as her hand met the unyielding hardness of his.

He pulled her to her feet with effortless strength, stood there regarding her.

“No, no,” she said. “Just, uh, burning some urgent rubbish.”

“Urgent rubbish,” he said, and a hint of a smile tickled across the hard line of his lips.

She was suddenly aware that she truly, at this moment, was living up to Mrs. Hamilton’s assessment of her as pathetic. A simple touch, her hand enfolded in his, not even a romantic gesture, made her feel things she had not felt through her entire engagement.

And that was before she added in the fact she had not had a decent haircut in months. Or put on a lick of makeup. Of all the people to catch her in her wedding dress, conducting ritualistic ceremonies at midnight, did it have to be him?

Did it have to be Brand Sheridan?

He let go of her hand as soon as she was steady on her feet, and turned away from her. He began to pick up the scattered wedding-dream debris, and shoved stuff back in the box, Sophie saw thankfully, without showing the least bit of interest in what that stuff was.

Sophie could have made her getaway through the hedge, but she found herself unwilling to abandon the box, and even though she knew better, unwilling to walk away. She felt as if she had not had a drink for days and he was clear water.

Days? No, longer. Months. Years.

And so she drank him in, thirstily. Part of her parched with a sense that only he could quench it, even though she despised herself for thinking that.

He was more solid than he had been before, boyish sleekness had given way to the devilishly attractive maturity of a man: broadness of shoulder, deepness of chest. And that was not all that had changed.

His dark hair was very short, his face clean-shaven. His dress was disappointingly conservative, even if the short-sleeved golf shirt did show off the breathtaking muscles of his biceps and forearms.

She felt a sharp sense of missing the boy who had walked away from here and not looked back. That boy of her memory had been a renegade. Back then, he had gone for black leather jackets and motorcycles.

To his mother’s consternation, he had favored jeans with rips in them—sometimes in places that had made Sophie’s adolescent heart beat in double time. His dark hair had been too long, and he’d always let a shadow of stubble darken the impossibly handsome planes of his face.

Now his hair was short, his face completely clean-shaven. There was the hard-edged discipline of a soldier in the way he held himself—an economy of movement that was mouth-dryingly masculine, graceful and powerful.

But, then her eyes had caught on the tiny hole in his ear.

Whoo, boy. Really too easy to imagine him as a pirate, legs braced against a tossing sea, powerful arms folded over the broadness of his chest—naked, she hoped—his head thrown back, welcoming the storms that others cringed from—

Stop, she pleaded with herself. God, she had been a reasonable person for years now! Years. She had almost married the world’s most reasonable man, hadn’t she?

And here he was, Brand Sheridan, wrecking it all. Wrecking her illusions, making her see she was not a reasonable person at all.

And probably never had been.

Chapter Two

“DO you have a pieced ear?” Sophie gasped, despite the fact she had ordered herself not to ask. More of her gift for getting it so wrong. It would have been so much better if she hadn’t noticed, or at least pretended not to have noticed!

Brand frowned, apparently not pleased that she had noticed, either. “I did,” he said, touched the lobe of that ear, let his hand fall away. But his voice invited no more questions, even while his ears invited nibbling…

Ever since she’d been voted “girl least likely to nibble earlobes” in her high-school annual, she’d thought about what it would be like to do just that. Not that she had ever let those raucous boys who had voted for her know that.

Let them think she was prim and stiffly uptight. They would have teased her even more unmercifully if they’d guessed at her secret romantic side.

She’d never had any urges to nibble Gregg’s ears. She’d been pleased that he had brought out her reasonable side. But of course, the something missing had reared its ugly head, and it probably had something to do with the forbidden temptations of earlobe-nibbling.

Especially ones that bore the mark of a piercing!

Sophie reminded herself she did not even know this man who shared the shadows with her at the moment.

He was not the same man who had called her all those years ago, on the worst night of her life, his voice alone penetrating the darkness, husky with pain. Aww Sweet Pea…she needed to remember that.

Brand Sheridan was not the same man who had left here. Really, he’d only been a boy when he left. And she’d been a girl, a carefree one, her biggest trouble trying to leave her nerdy reputation behind her. She’d been blissfully unaware of the tragedies that awaited her, both her parents killed in a terrible accident when she was eighteen.

Brand, apparently oblivious to her fascination with his earlobes, picked up another paper, stuffed it in the box, scanned the yard and then turned back to her.

Now, she could see it was the look in his eyes, not his earlobes, that was the most changed. Sapphire-dark, the firelight winked off that impossible shade of blue, deep and mysterious as the ocean.

Back then, she remembered, there was an ever-present sparkle of mischief in them, laughter never far away, a devil-may-care grin always tickling around the edges of that too-sexy mouth.

Now his eyes were wary. And weary. A shield was up in them that Sophie somehow doubted he ever let down.

And his mouth had a stern line etched around it, as if he no longer smiled, as if the mischievous boy who had caught the neighbor’s snotty Siamese cat and tied a baby bonnet on it before releasing it was banished from him somehow. In the place of that boy was a warrior, ready for things that were foreign to the citizens of this tiny town.

She wanted to touch the firm line of that mouth, as if she would be able to feel the smile that had once been there. She wanted to say, Brand, what’s happened to you?

Thankfully, sensible Sophie took charge before she made a complete fool of herself.

“Thank you, Brandon,” she said, and wrested the box from him. Realizing she sounded stiffly formal, she added, “I’ll remember you in my will.”

Stop it, she pleaded with her inner geek. Please just stop!

But the tiniest of smiles teased the hard line around his mouth, and she found herself surprised and pleased that he remembered the line she always thanked him with when he had come to her defense.

“That’s a line from my past,” he said wryly.

“I did have a gift for getting into scrapes,” she admitted reluctantly.

“I remember. What was the name of that kid who chased you home after the game at Harrison Park?”

“I don’t remember,” she said stiffly, though of course she remembered perfectly.

“Ned?”

“Nelbert,” she offered reluctantly, even though it was an admission she might remember after all.

“Why was he chasing you?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Just a sec. I do!”

Please, no.

“You told him he was more stupid than a dog who chased skunks,” Brand recalled, “Right?”

“I thought because I’d learned to say it in Japanese I could get away with it. As it turned out, tone was everything.”

And just when she had thought she was dead, because she had made it all the way home and no one had been there, Nelbert practically breathing down her neck, Brand had stepped out of the shadows off his porch. He had folded his arms across his chest, planted his legs and smiled, only it hadn’t really been a smile.

He hadn’t done anything else, nor had to. Nelbert had stopped dead, and skulked off, not even daring to glare at her. Nelbert had never tried to even the score again, either.

“Japanese,” Brand said, and gave a rueful little shake of his head. “You were always a character.”

A character. Thanks. I’m hoping for my own comic-book series.

“So, what are you doing in my dad’s yard in your—” He studied her intently for a minute. “—is that a nightgown?”

“Oh, you know, just doing what comes naturally. Being a character.”

See? Just when she thought she had nothing to be grateful for, Sophie had been saved from getting married in front of the whole town in a dress that people would say looked like a nightgown, her gift for getting things exactly wrong not as far in her past as she might have hoped.

She continued brightly, “I was just doing a little burning. Some rubbish.” She began to edge her way toward the hole in the hedge. Men like Brand Sheridan were like drugs. He could make her forget what she’d come out here to do—say good-bye to romantic notions.

Not to start believing in them all over again. A man like him could make a woman like her—determined to face the world, strong, realistic, in-dependent—capitulate to a weaker side. A side that leaned toward the fantastic—pirates, earlobe nibbling, or the worst fantasy of all: forever.

“You’re burning rubbish at—” He glanced at his watch, frowned. “—midnight?” He frowned and shot a glance at the house. “Does my dad know you’re out here?”

“He’s away.” She edged closer to the hedge. “Didn’t he know you were coming?”

Dr. Sheridan was busy wooing Sophie’s grandmother, who had come from Germany after Sophie’s parents had died, reading between the lines of Sophie’s proclamations she was just fine, knowing, as only a grandmother knew, that she wasn’t fine, trying to fix it with schnitzel and kaese spechle.

Magic foods that had helped, if not healed. Helped not just her, but Dr. Sheridan after Mrs. Sheridan had died so suddenly.

This weekend her grandmother and Brand’s father were taking in Shakespeare at the Park in Waterville, the next town over. They were staying the night.

Sophie had not enquired about whether their accommodations were single or double. She didn’t want to know, and they were always so sweetly discreet. But it certainly didn’t feel like her place to update Brand on his father’s love life.

“I thought I’d surprise him,” Brand said.

There was something in the way he said that, with a certain flat grimness in his tone, that made her think Brand probably knew his picture had been taken off the family mantel.

She should remember that when his scent was acting like a drug on her resolutions. He was a man who couldn’t even come home for his own mother’s funeral. His father had not said couldn’t, but wouldn’t.

“Your dad will be home tomorrow.” She remembered the lateness of the hour. “Or is that today? I guess it is today, now. Sunday. Yes.”

He’d always had this effect on her. Smart, articulate woman manages to make a fool out of herself every time she opens her mouth.

I’m not fifteen, her inner voice shouted. Out loud, she said pleasantly, “And I’m sure he will be surprised. Well, good—”

The wind picked that moment to sail a wayward wedding picture cartwheeling across the ground in front of him. He stooped, snagged it, straightened and studied it.

Handed it to her silently.

It was a picture of the inside of a stone chapel, with a bride kneeling at the altar alone, her dress spilling down stone stairs.

A bride alone. At the time the picture had seemed blissfully romantic, with a serenity to it, a sacredness. In light of her new circumstances, the bride looked abandoned. She should have been more careful about the pictures she cut out.

Sophie crumpled it and threw it in the box.

“Rubbish,” she reiterated proudly.

He studied her for a long, stripping moment. It occurred to her he might be able to tell she’d been crying. She hoped not!

“That’s not a nightgown, is it, Sweet Pea?” His voice was suddenly soft, impossibly gentle for a man with such hard lines in his face and such a cynical light in his eyes.

Just like that, he was the man who had called her the night her parents had been killed, getting her through the hours that followed, awww, Sweet Pea.

She steeled herself against his pirate charm.

“No,” she said and tilted her chin proudly, “It’s not a nightgown.”

“Are you going to up and get married?” he asked, and his tone had that familiar teasing note in it, a note that did not match the new lines in his face.

Had Brand and his father become that estranged? That Dr. Sheridan didn’t even share the town news with him? The gossip, everyone knowing everyone else’s business, who was having babies and who was getting married—and who was splitting up—was part of what made a small town tick!

Still, there was something refreshing, freeing, about being with the only person in her world who didn’t know her history. Who wasn’t sending her sideways looks, loaded with sympathy now that Gregg had chosen another.

“I’m marrying the mystery of the night,” she told him solemnly. “It’s an ancient ceremony that dates back to the worship of goddesses.”

He contemplated her for a moment, and she had that feeling again. Why did she always feel driven to say foolish things around him?

But then he rewarded her with a smile that, ever so briefly, chased the dark shadow from his eyes.

“Sweet Pea, you were always an original.”

“Yes, I know, an original character.”

“Do you know how rare that is in the world?” The sadness in his eyes had returned.

She didn’t. She wanted to invite him to the fire so he could tell her what a good thing it was. Wanted to chase the shadows from his eyes and make him laugh. And feel his touch again.

He was a weakness in a life she was determined to make about strength and independence. If she really practiced ancient ceremonies, which she didn’t, Brand Sheridan’s sudden arrival would surely be interpreted as a test of her commitment.

“Good night,” she said firmly, and pushed her way, finally, through the gap in the prickly hedge. She felt sick when the dress caught, somewhere high up the back of her rib cage, the snagging sound loud against the quiet of the night.

She froze, then pulled tentatively, but she was caught, and even though she reminded herself she didn’t need this dress anymore, she couldn’t bring herself to risk wrecking it by yanking free.

Now what? Set down the box to free up her hands so she could untangle the dress? Even bending to set down the box was probably going to damage the dress further.

She cast a look over her shoulder, hoping Brand had departed at her firm good-night. But, oh no, he stood there, arms folded over the solidness of his chest, watching her, amusement playing with the stern cast of his features.

Around him, everything always went wrong. Would a dignified departure have been too much to ask for?

Sophie backed up a half step hoping that would release the twig caught in her dress. Instead she heard a brand-new snagging sound at her waist.

How was it she had managed to get through the hedge the first time without incident?

Now she was afraid to move at all in case she tangled the dress further in the twigs. She could throw down the box, but what if its contents scattered again?

It seemed like an hour had passed as she contemplated her options. A gentleman would have figured out she needed help.

But Brand, black sheep of his family, was no gentleman. That was evident when she slid him another look.

He was enjoying her situation. His shoulders were actually shaking with mirth, though he was trying to keep his expression inscrutable.

“Could you give me a hand?” she snapped.

She would have been better off, she realized, too late, to rip the dress or throw down the box. Because she had invited him in way too close.

He shoved through the hedge, oblivious to the prickles and the fact the gap was way too small to accommodate him. He stood at her shoulder, pressed close. For the second time, the scent of him, warmly, seductively masculine, filled her nostrils. Now, she could also feel the warmth of his breath tickling the nape of her neck, touching the delicate lobe of her ear.

She was instantly covered in goose bumps.

Naturally, he noticed!

“Are you cold, Sophie?” he asked, his voice a rough whisper that intensified the goose bumps.

“Frozen,” she managed to mumble, “it’s chilly at this time of night.”

That declaration gave her an excuse to shiver when his hand touched her arm, heated, Brand branding her.

He laughed softly, not fooled, all too certain of his charm around women. And she was absurdly, jealously aware this was not the first time he had handled the intricacies of women’s clothing.

He might have been touching a wounded, frightened bird, his fingers on her tangled gown were so exquisitely gentle.

Experienced, she told herself. Brand Sheridan had been out of her league before he had made a career of being an adventurer. Now, every exotic world he had visited was in his touch.

“There,” he said.

She gritted her teeth. “I think I’m caught in one more place. Left side. Waist.”

His breath moved away from her ear, she felt his hand trace the line of her waist in the darkness.

With a quick flick of his wrist that came both too soon and not nearly soon enough, she felt him free her. She dashed away without saying thank you and without looking back.

But his chuckle followed her. “By the way, Sweet Pea, you can’t marry the night. You promised you were going to wait for me.”

Yes, she had. In one of those rash moments of late-night letter writing shortly after he’d left, full of the drama and angst and emotion a girl feels at fifteen and really never again, Sophie had promised she would love him forever. And had she done that? Thrown away the bird in hand for a complete fantasy she had sold herself when she was a young teen?

“Brand Sheridan,” she called back, grateful for the distance and the darkness that protected her from his all-seeing gaze, “don’t you embarrass me by reminding me of my fifteen-year-old self!”

“I loved your fifteen-year-old self.”

A test. A black, star-filled night, a fire roaring in the background, her in a wedding dress, and Brand Sheridan loving her, even if it was who she used to be. Not that she should kid herself he’d had an inkling who she was, then or now. Or that what he so casually called love should in any way be mistaken for the real thing.

“You did not,” Sophie told him sternly. “You found me aggravating. And annoying. Exceedingly.”

His laughter nearly called her back to the other side of the hedge, but no, she was making her escape. She was not going to be charmed by him.

Time to get over it! Maybe it was a good thing Brand Sheridan had finally come home.

Maybe a person had to close the door on the past completely before they could have a hope for the future.

Maybe that’s why things had not worked out between her and Gregg.

Ignoring the rich invitation of his laughter, and her desire to see if it could possibly erase whatever haunted his eyes, Sophie scuttled across her own backyard, and through the door of her house, letting it slam behind her.

Brand was aware, as he walked through the darkness back to the front of his father’s home, that he felt something he had not felt in a long, long time.

It took him a moment to identify it.

And then he realized that his heart felt light. Sophie Holtzheim, Sweet Pea, was as funny as ever. The fact that it was largely unintentional only made it funnier.

“The goddess in the garden burning urgent rubbish and marrying the night,” he muttered to himself, with a rueful shake of his head.

Still, there was a part that wasn’t funny, Brand thought, searching over the casing of the front door for his father’s hidden house key. Sweet Pea now looked like the goddess she had alluded to.

He wasn’t even quite sure how he’d known it was her, she was so changed. He remembered a freckled face, a shock of reddish hair, always messy, constantly sunburnt and scraped. He remembered glasses, knobby elbows and knees, her hand coming up to cover a wide mouth glittering with silvery braces.

He remembered earnestness, a worried brow, a depth that sometimes took him by surprise and made him feel like the uneasy, superficial boy that he had been.

And no doubt still was.

He also remembered, with a rueful smile, she had been correct. He’d found her intensely irritating.

From the lofty heights of a five-year age difference he had protected his funny little neighbor from bullies, rescued her from scrapes and tolerated, just barely, her crush on him.

For his first year in the military, her letters, the envelopes distinctive in her girlish hand and different colored inks, had followed him. At first just casual, tidbits of town news, a bit of gossip, updates on people they both knew, but eventually she’d been emboldened by the distance, admitting love, promising to wait, pleading for pictures.

He’d felt the kindest thing—and happily also the most convenient—had been to ignore her completely.

He’d been in touch with her only once, in the eight years since he had left here, a call when her parents had been killed in that terrible accident at the train crossing on Miller Street. She’d only been eighteen and he remembered wishing he could be there for her, poor kid.

Sophie had been part of the fabric of his life, someone he had taken for granted, but been fiercely protective of at the same time. He’d always had a thing about protecting Sophie Holtzheim.

He’d been overseas, at a base with one bank of telephones, when his mother had e-mailed him the news within minutes of it happening. He’d waited in line for hours to use one of those phones, needing to say something to Sophie. And instead of wise and comforting words coming out of his mouth, he’d held the phone and heard himself say, across the thousands of miles that separated them, aww, Sweet Pea.

How much he cared about his aggravating, funny nuisance of a neighbor had taken him by surprise, because if asked he probably would have claimed he was indifferent to her. That was certainly how he had acted the majority of the time. But on the phone that night, his heart felt as if it was breaking in two as he helplessly listened to her sob on the other end of the line. Brand felt as if he’d failed her by being a million miles away, instead of there.

Maybe it was always her eyes that had made him feel so attached to his young neighbor, despite the manly pretense of complete indifference.

Her eyes had a worried look that often creased her brow; they were hazel and huge. Even behind those glasses, they had been gorgeous way before the rest of her was. There had been something in them that was faintly unsettling and certainly older than she was: calm, as if she looked at a person and knew secrets about them they had not yet told themselves.

Seeing her tonight, touching her, he realized Sophie had grown into the promise of those eyes. And then some.

Her hair had lost the red and deepened to a shade of auburn that the firelight had licked at the edges of, making a man itch to touch it to see if it was fire or silk or a seductive combination of both.

He was not sure where freckles went when they went away, but there was no hint she had ever been a freckle-face. Her complexion now was creamy and perfect. Not that he had thought about it, but if he had, he would not have envisioned a grown-up Sweet Pea being quite so lovely.

Seeing her as a woman had been slightly unsettling. She had filled out that gown pretty nicely. If he hadn’t realized just in time that it was Sweet Pea, he might have let his eyes drift to where the fabric clung to breasts that had been unfettered with anything as sinful as a bra.

But he was still the guy who had stood between her and her tormentors, and there had been as many who tormented her about her success with “What Makes a Small Town Tick” as there had been those who were happy for her.

She’d never known when to back down, either. That girl had a gift for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time.

He’d even vetted her rare suitors, doing his best to scare them off, and given her unsolicited advice.

Sweet Pea, all men are swine.

Including you?

Especially me.

Brand had been the older brother she didn’t have but badly needed.

Sweet Pea still lived next door. Didn’t anything in Sugar Maple Grove ever change?

Yes, it did. Because she was not the same Sweet Pea he remembered. And he was not the same guy she thought she knew, either. He didn’t feel like her older brother anymore.

He had not set foot in this town for eight years. Family occasions had long since moved to his sister’s in New York, and his parents had visited him in California.

Brand suddenly remembered his mother’s childlike enjoyment of Disneyland, how she would get off the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, and then get right back in line to go again.

Mom.

The light heartedness left him, and another feeling hit. Hard. On this porch where his mother had rocked and waited for him to come home, hours after the curfews he had always chaffed against, careless of her feelings.

He was aware he had managed to outrun his grief and his sense of failure toward his family until the exact moment he drove back into town, under that canopy of huge maples that lined the Main Street, past the tidy redbrick-fronted businesses, their bright awnings rolled up for the night.

The residential streets had been so quiet tonight, the sidewalks between the tree-lined boulevards and large grassy yards with their whitewashed picket fences completely empty.

He could sense people sleeping peacefully under those moss-covered roofs, curtains fluttering out of open, unlocked windows.

It was postcard-pretty small-town America. The place he had sworn his life to protect, and that, ironically, when he was young, he could not wait to get away from.

Now, standing on the porch of the house he had grown up in, searching for a key he knew would still be hidden in the same place, his mother’s sweetness gathered around him.

He could practically taste her strawberry lemonade.

His father had made it clear he would never forgive him for not being at her funeral.

The words deep cover meant nothing to Dr. Sheridan, who did not consider a career chasing the world’s bad guys to be in any way honorable.

There had been no explaining to his father that years of carefully laid work could have been lost if Brand had come home. Lives could have been endangered by breaking the cover.

“I don’t want to hear your excuses,”Dr. Sheridan had said the last time Brand had called.

“He’s mad at you, anyway,” his sister had told him, always pragmatic, when she had enlisted Brand to make this journey to their childhood home. “There’s no sense his being mad at both of us, is there?”

Marcie had told Brand there had been an incident. A fire in the kitchen. An unattended frying pan.

His sister had some legitimate concerns and questions about whether their dad, seventy-four on his next birthday, who had never cooked for himself or looked after a house, should be starting now.

Brand, what if he’s losing it? Then what?

That’s what Brand was here to find out.

To do the job nobody else had the stomach for. Didn’t that have a familiar ring to it? His whole adult life had been spent stepping up to the plates that wiser men stepped away from.

Finding the key, he went in. Without turning on lights, Brand went up the stairs and into a room with a steeply sloped roof that had once been his.

An open box inside the door was crammed full of Brand’s football trophies and school photos—his grad picture was on the top—the one that had once been on the mantel.

He kicked off his shoes, flopped down, coughing slightly at the cloud of dust that rose out of the unused bedding. He closed his eyes. The whole house had a scorched smell to it that made him miserably aware of his mission.

He opened his eyes again, contemplated the flicker of light on the ceiling and realized the fire was still burning in the yard. He tried to reclaim the lightness he had felt earlier by thinking of his encounter with Sophie.

A thought blasted through his brain, unwelcome and uninvited.

Had Sweet Pea been crying?

He got it suddenly. Ah. She wasn’t marrying the night. She’d just tried to distract him from the real story with her legendary cleverness. She was in his father’s backyard at midnight burning wedding pictures in a wedding dress because somebody had broken her heart.

And it was only a sign of how tired he was, how the world he’d left behind was colliding with the one he’d made for himself, that instead of feeling sad for her, he felt oddly glad.

He didn’t want Sweet Pea marrying anyone without his approval. It was as if eight years of separation didn’t exist at all, and he was stepping back into the role he’d always assumed around her.

Big brother. Protector.

Only now, he thought, thinking of her huge eyes and the swell of her naked breast beneath the film of that sheer dress, he didn’t exactly feel like a big brother. In fact, he could probably add himself to whomever or whatever he was protecting her from.

Chapter Three

“I THINK I’ll call the police,” his father said, eyeing him from the bedroom door. “Break and enter is still against the law.”

Brand turned over, winced at the light pouring into the room, eyed his father and then the clock. From his sister’s reports he had expected his father to look older, frazzled, his white hair sticking up à la Albert Einstein.

Dr. Sheridan, in fact, had already combed his rather luxurious steel-gray hair, and looked quite dapper in dark pants, a crisp white shirt, a suit vest that matched the pants.

“It’s not break and enter if you have a key,” Brand said mildly. “Hi, Dad.” It was nearly noon. Brand had slept for close to twelve hours.

“Humph. I guess you’re the expert on all things criminal. If I called the cops, you’d probably flash your badge at them, wouldn’t you? You’d probably have me arrested. Shipped off to an old folks’ home. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”

Whoo boy. Everything was going to be a fight—if he let it. Brand wasn’t going to let it. There was absolutely no point telling his father he wasn’t a cop, and he didn’t have a badge. He was an operative. But he wasn’t a doctor, and that’s all his father really cared about.

“How are you, Dad?”

“That fire could have happened to anyone,” his father said, defensively. “Your sister sent you here, didn’t she?”

Brand felt relieved that his dad was obviously mentally agile enough to figure that out.

“Any chance of getting a cup of coffee?”

“Get your own damn coffee,” his father snorted, “I’m having coffee next door.”

“At Sophie’s?” Brand asked, intrigued.

But his father didn’t answer, gave him a dark look that let him know he was not included in coffee plans, and slammed the bedroom door.

That went well, Brand thought. On the bright side, Dr. Sheridan hadn’t ordered Brand to get out of his house and never come back. Maybe there was something here they could salvage.

Unless his sister was right. If his dad was losing it, not capable of living on his own anymore, and if Brand was the one who had gathered the evidence, there would be nothing left to salvage.

“How did I get myself into this?”

He’d known he’d have to come home sooner or later, and, as it happened, he needed a place to be safe. God, if Sugar Maple Grove didn’t qualify in spades. As if to confirm that, a church bell pealed in the distance.

Brand got up, stretched mightily, aware of how deeply rested he felt.

In four years deep undercover, assuming an identity, moving in a glitzy world of wealth and crime, a man lost something of himself. And he never quite slept. One eye open, part of him ever alert, part of him hating the life he lived, making people he would betray like him and trust him.

Well, not him. The role he played—Brian Lancaster—though who he was and who he pretended to be had begun to fuse together in ways he had not expected.

Now, having slept well, Brand felt more himself than he had felt for a long time. Or was it because he had seen the reflection of himself as he used to be, in Sophie’s huge hazel eyes?

A funny irony that the place he couldn’t wait to get away from might have something to give him back now, all these years later.

“Who could have predicted I would become a man who would treasure a good night’s sleep more than most men would treasure gold?” he muttered ruefully to himself.

Brand showered and dressed, then moved downstairs, guiltily aware he was looking for evidence his father might be slipping.

Everything seemed to be in need of repairs, but Dr. Sheridan had never been gifted at things like that, faintly flabbergasted when Brand had shown an early knack with something so primitive as a hammer.

Brand’s sister, Marcie, had said, vaguely: if there’s something wrong, you’ll know. Mittens in the fridge, that kind of thing.

“No mittens in the fridge,” Brand said, opening the fridge door and peering inside. “No food, either.” Did he report that to Marcie?

He went out the front door to his car—a little sports number he’d purchased before his Brian Lancaster assignment. Now, it seemed too much like a car Lancaster would have chosen, and he was aware of wanting to get rid of it.

Brand needed coffee. Did everyone still go for coffee at Maynard’s, morning coffee house, afternoon soda fountain and evening ice-cream parlor?

Brand was aware of a reluctance to see everyone, the chasms that separated his life from the life in this small town probably too deep to cross.

He never made it to the car.

“Young man. You! Come!”

An old woman, dapper in a red hat, was waving at him from Sophie’s porch. He saw his dad and Sophie out there, too, and remembered Sunday brunch on the porch was always something of a pre-church tradition in Sugar Maple Grove.

He could smell the coffee from here and it smelled rich and good and added to that sense of coming home to small-town America.

He hesitated only for a moment, was drawn by curiosity to see Sophie in the light of day, and went through the gap in the hedge that separated the front lawns. The path between the houses was worn.

He registered, peripherally, a man trained to notice everything, that there was a lot of going back and forth between these two houses.

When his dad wasn’t around, he would have to thank Sophie for looking in on him.

Sophie’s porch was out of the American dream: deep shadows, dark wicker furniture with bright-yellow striped cushions, a gray painted wood floor, purple-and-white petunias spilling color and scent out of window boxes.

And she was part of the same dream. Despite the fact his father and the old woman were there, Brand could see only Sophie. Somehow, in the years between them, she had gone from being a delightful little nerd to the all-American girl.

“Good morning, Sweet Pea,” he said, taking the empty seat beside her.

“Don’t call me that.” Then, with ill grace, remembering her manners, “Brandon, this is my grandmother, Hilde Holtzheim.”

“The pleasure is mine, but my granddaughter, she is not a sweet pee in the morning,” the old woman said in heavily accented English, “More like a sour poop.”

He could tell from the accent that Sophie’s grandmother was German, and he almost greeted her in that language, one of three he spoke fluently thanks to countless hours in language school getting ready for overseas undercover assignments.

But before he could speak, Sophie did.

“Grandma! He doesn’t mean that kind of pee! He’s talking about a flower.” Sophie was blushing. Brand could already feel that heavy place in him lightening.

“Oh.” Sophie’s grandmother’s eyes widened. “He compares you with flowers?” she asked in German. “That’s romantic!”

Maybe, he decided, it would be way more fun not to let on he spoke German. His father, colossally indifferent to any career choice outside of medicine, did not know his only son spoke any language other than English.

His decision paid off immediately when Hilde turned to Sophie and said in rapid German, “Ach. Gorgeous. You and him. Beautiful babies.”

Sophie shot him a glance, and Brand kept his expression carefully bland, congratulated himself because it was obviously going to be so entertaining not to let on he spoke German.

“What did she say?” he asked Sophie innocently.

Today, Sophie wore a white T-shirt and shorts. Her hair, that amazing shade of mink browns and coppers mixed, was thick and sleep-rumpled. It was half caught up, half falling out of a rubber band. She didn’t have a lick of makeup on.

She looked all of sixteen, but he knew she hadn’t looked like this at sixteen because he had been the recipient of a picture taken at her sixteenth birthday party and she’d still been awkward then, duckling, pre-swan.

Now, it occurred to Brand that Sophie was going to be one of those women who came more and more into herself as she got older, but who would somehow look young and fresh when she was fifty.

“She said you don’t look like the kind of man who would be interested in flowers.” She shot Hilde a warning look.

“What kind of man do I look like?” he asked Hilde.

He was aware of liking sitting beside Sophie. She smelled of soap, nothing else, and he was surprised by how much he had missed something as simple and as real as a girl sitting on her front porch with no makeup and no perfume and her hair not styled.

She tried to hide her naked legs under the tablecloth, but before they disappeared, he noticed her toenails were painted candy-floss pink.

And he was struck again with a sense of having missed such innocence. In the world of Brian Lancaster, there had been no modesty. The types of women who were attracted to the wealth and power of the types of men he had been dedicated to putting in jail all aspired to be swimsuit models or actresses.

They were tanned, fit, artificially enhanced and wore lots of makeup and very little clothing. He did not think he had seen a natural hair color in four years. They had also been slickly superficial, materialistic and manipulative. For four years he had been surrounded by the new and international version of the old-fashioned mafia moll. His colleagues envied him the lifestyle he pretended at, but he had felt something souring in his own soul.

Brand had not even allowed himself to think of this world back here, of women who didn’t care about flashy rings, designer clothes, parties, lifestyles so decadent it would have put the Romans to shame.

It occurred to him that he might have died of loneliness if he had allowed his thoughts to drift to someone like Sophie as he immersed himself deeper and deeper into a superficial world where people were willing to do anything—absolutely anything—to insure their place in it.

“You look like a man,” Hilde said, starting in English and switching to German, “who would have a kiss that could change lead into gold.”

“She says you look like a man with a good appetite,” Sophie said, without missing a beat. “She wants you to eat something.”

The table was loaded with croissants and muffins and homemade jams, fresh fruit, frosty glasses of juice—the simple meal seemed so good and so real after the world he had come from.

His stomach rumbled as the old lady in the red hat glared at her granddaughter, smiled approvingly at him, poured him a juice and then coffee.

“Eat,” she insisted, and then in German, “A man like you needs his strength.”

Sophie’s German was halting. “Stop,” she warned her grandmother, “be good.”

“I’m supposed to be the old lady, not you,” Hilde muttered, unrepentant. In German. “Look at his lips.”

He was aware that Sophie looked, then looked away.

“Enough to make any woman,” Hilde searched for the word in German, blurted out in English, “swine.”

“Swoon,” Sophie corrected her automatically, and then turned beet-red. “She says to tell you the raspberry jam is to swoon for. She means to die for.”

The old woman was staring at his lips. “Yes, to die for.”

He laughed. “That’s mighty good jam.”

Brand was aware his father had his arms folded stubbornly over his chest, not finding the hilarity all that hilarious. Brand dutifully looked at his father for any signs of malnourishment, given the condition of his fridge, but the elder Sheridan actually looked fleshier than Brand could ever remember in the past.

He turned his attention back to Sophie, who was still blushing. In the light of day, he was aware again how pretty she had become in a wholesome way, and how watching a girl like her blush was an underrated pleasure.

After the life he had lived undercover—in-filtrating a gang of exceedingly wealthy and sophisticated weapons smugglers and currency counterfeiters—there was something about her wholesomeness—her ability to blush—that appealed to him, shocked him by making him yearn for a road not taken.

It occurred to him that maybe people should listen to the adage “you can’t go home again” and not even try.

Because he could never be this innocent again. But maybe he could just enjoy this moment for what it was: simple, enjoyable, companionable.

He was aware, again, that that was the first time in years he had felt relaxed in a social situation.

Safe, he thought in a way only someone who lived with constant danger could appreciate. Once, he had hated how this place never changed.

Now, he thought, maybe a month here wouldn’t be so bad after all.

He could see Hilde eyeing him with unremitting interest, despite Sophie elbowing her in the ribs and warning her in soft German to quit staring.

“Your father tells me you’re a secret agent,” Hilde said, pushing Sophie’s elbow away.

“No,” he said firmly, though it surprised him his father had said anything about him, since he was persona non grata. “I belong to a military branch that was developed as an antiterrorism squad. I’m just a soldier.”

“Very exciting,” Hilde declared.

“Not really. Ninety-nine percent pure tedium, one percent all hell breaking loose.”

“But you were under the covers?”

He saw Sophie, who was just beginning to recover from her last blush, turning a lovely shade of pink all over again beside him. In the world he had just come from, women didn’t blush. And they said things a whole lot more suggestive than you were under the covers. Sophie’s blush was so refreshing.

“I was. It’s not as exciting as it sounds, believe me.” The grandmother didn’t look like she believed him, so he headed her off at the pass. “Sophie, I didn’t have a chance to catch up with you last night. It’s been what? Eight years? What do you do now?”

“Last night?” his father sputtered.

Brand could tell by Sophie’s sudden slathering of marmalade on a croissant that what she had been doing last night was private to her. That instinct to protect her rose to the surface instantly.

“We ran into each other briefly when I arrived.” He watched her out of the corner of his eye, saw her catch a breath of relief that the details of her secret ceremony by the fire were safe with him.

Still, if he remembered correctly, Sophie didn’t even like marmalade.

“Oh,” his father said, his tone crotchety.

Her grandmother looked disappointed, Sophie looked relieved. She took a bite of her croissant, and her eyes nearly crossed. She glared at the marmalade.

“I’ll take that one,” he said smoothly and passed her his own croissant and the jar of raspberry jam. “As I recall, your grandmother says this is the one to swine for.”

He smiled at her to let her know he’d noticed she was rattled. And he raised an eyebrow evilly that asked if it was him that was rattling her.

But when she took a little nibble of the new croissant, ignoring the jam, and a crumb stuck at the corner of her mouth, he wondered just who was rattling whom.

“I work for the Historical Society,” Sophie said, but reluctantly. “I’m sure you would find what I do exceedingly boring.”

“It’s not,” his father rushed to her defense. “Sophie is our only paid employee at the Society. She’s a whiz at organization. A whiz! She’s going to write a book.”

“Well, not exactly,” she said swiftly, blushing sweetly again. “I’m going to gather material for a book. A collection of remembrances of Sugar Maple Grove during the Second World War. I won’t really be writing it so much as selecting and editing.”

It occurred to Brand that once upon a time he would have found Sophie’s choice of work exceedingly boring. But having just spent four years around women who were ditzy, who thought it was cute to be dumb, he found himself intrigued by Sophie’s career choice.

His father began to talk about the book with great relish—and considerable savvy.

Brand allowed himself to hope his sister was wrong, and to sink deeper into the feeling of being somewhere good. And decent.

Then the mood suddenly changed. A bright-red sports car was slowing in front of the house, then, apparently having spotted the people on the porch, it pulled in.

Sophie had been starting to relax as Dr. Sheridan had waxed lyrical about Sugar Maple Grove’s contribution to the war.

Now Brand was aware of her freezing, like a deer caught in headlights. Unless he was mistaken, she was getting ready to bolt.

“The nerve,” her grandmother said, and then in German, “I’d like to cover him in honey and stake him out over an ant hill. Naked.”

Brand, practiced at deception, never let on with so much as a flicker of a smile that he understood her perfectly. He watched, as did they all, as the man got out of his car.

If there was one thing Brand had gotten very good at spotting—and not being the least impressed by—it was wealth and all its trappings, the car, the designer sweater, the knife-pressed pants, the flash of a solid-gold pinkie ring.

“Mama’s boy,” his father hissed with disdain, and then shot Brand a look and muttered sulkily, “not that that’s always such a bad thing.”

But as he was reading the shift of mood at the table, it was Sophie that Brand was most aware of.

She had gone white as a sheet, and he could see tension in the curve of her neck, in the sudden locking of her fingers. She had hunched over as if she was trying to make herself smaller.

He had a memory from a long time ago. He and some friends shooting baskets at the riverside park where Main Street ended. Sophie had been walking home from school. She’d been thirteen, it had been after her speech in that national competition.

“Hey, metal mouth,” some Main Street big shot had yelled at her. “What makes a small-town hick? You!”

Brand’s eyes had flown to Sophie. He had seen her hunch over those books, trying hard to make herself invisible.

Brand had come out of that group shooting baskets and been across the street in a breath. He’d picked up that loser by his T-shirt collar, shoved him against the wall and held him there.

“Don’t you ever pick on that girl again,” he’d said, his quietness not beginning to hide his rage. “Or I’ll make you into a small-town brick, pound you down to dust, make you into a little square and stick you on this wall forever. Comprende?”

Even then he’d had a certain warped gift for tackling things in a way that had made him a prime find, first for the United States Marine Corps and then for the unit he now served.

Through those organizations, Brand had become much more disciplined in his use of force, at channeling righteous fury to better purpose, at choosing when aggression was the appropriate response.

A frightened nod, and Brand had let the creep go, caught up to Sophie and slipped the books away from her.

“Put your head up,” he’d told her. “Don’t you ever let a dork like that control you, Sweet Pea.”

No gratitude, of course.

She’d given him her snotty look, and said, “Brand Sheridan, don’t even pretend you know what a dork is.”

“It’s a guy like that.”

“It’s a whale penis,” she told him. And then she blushed as if she had said or done something really bad, and surprisingly, he had blushed, too.

Now, sitting here beside her, he tried to think if he had blushed like that since then. Or at all. He doubted it.

But she still blushed.

Suddenly, Brand was aware she had flexed the muscles in her legs, just enough to push back slightly from the table, and he just knew she was going to bolt.

And that for some reason he couldn’t let her. It was a variation of holding her head up high. He laid a hand on her arm, not holding her down, just resting his fingers lightly on her skin, his own hand completely still, willing his own stillness into her.

He felt her eyes on his face, but he didn’t look at her, didn’t take his eyes off the man who had made her shrink as if she was still the town brainiac carrying her books down Main Street, a target for every smart aleck with an opinion.

Brand was aware, even as he made himself go still, even as he let her see and feel only his stillness, that something in him coiled, ready, ready to protect her with his life if need be.

He didn’t know exactly what was going on. But Brand knew whatever it was she couldn’t run from this. Whoever Slick was coming up her front walk, Sophie shouldn’t let him know he had that much power over her.

Why did he?

Slick came up the steps, sockless in designer sandals, and flashed them a smile made astoundingly white by perfect porcelain veneers.

“Dr. Sheridan. The misses Holtzheim.”

He seemed unaware that no one looked happy to see him, that he would have to search long and hard to find a more unwelcoming group in Sugar Maple Grove.

He raised spa-shaped eyebrows at Brand, and put out his hand.

Brand half rose, took it, felt the softness, and squeezed just a little harder than might be considered strictly polite.

He did not return the smile, intensely aware of how stiff Sophie had become, her face rigid with pride, even as her hands gripped the tablecloth just out of view, white-knuckled.

“Brand Sheridan,” he introduced himself.

“Oh, our war vet! What an honor, the hero returning to Sugar Maple Grove.” His tone was aw, shucks, but Brand did not miss something faintly condescending in it. “I’m Gregg Hamilton.”

Ah, the Hamiltons. Strictly white-collar. Old money. That explained the underlying disdain for the public servant.

“I think you might have gone to school with my brother, Clarence.”

I think I might have taken a round out of him behind the school for having exactly the same snotty look on his face that you do.

Somewhere along the line the military had managed to channel all that aggression he’d visited on others. His father might not be willing to admit what a good thing that was, but Brand knew he was a better man for it.

Brand shrugged, letting nothing of his own growing disdain show in his face. This was what he was good at, after all, never letting on what he was really feeling.

“Sophie, Mama told me she dropped by yesterday. I just wanted to echo her invitation to come to Toni’s and my engagement party. It would be so good if you came. I think you’ll adore Antoinette. I’m hoping you’ll be friends.”

Hilde Holtzheim muttered something in German that was the equivalent of go screw yourself, worm face.

Suddenly Brand put together Sophie sitting in front of that fire last night in her wedding dress, burning all manner of wedding paraphernalia with her tension at the unexpected arrival of Slick Hamilton.

Surely, Sophie hadn’t been going to marry this guy? Worm face?

But a quick glance at Sophie, trying so hard to retain her pride, a plastic smile glued across her face, confirmed it.

Not only had she been going to, it looked like she regretted the fact she wasn’t! The little ceremony he’d interrupted at the fire pit last night was all beginning to make an ugly kind of sense now.

Well, that’s what happened when you left a lovely hometown girl, innocent to the ways of the world, to her own devices for too many years. She had all kinds of room to screw up.

“Um,” Sophie stalled, “I haven’t checked the calendar yet. What day was it?”

Brand hated seeing her squirm, and he hated it that she was so transparent. The little worm could see just how badly he’d managed to hurt her—which was exactly the kind of thing that made little worms like him feel gleeful with power.

Gregg actually looked as if he was enjoying himself enough to pull up a chair and have a croissant with them!

Brand slid Sophie a look. Slick Hamilton wasn’t the kind of threat you had to keep a hand free to get at your hidden holster for.

The look on her face reminded him of another time when he’d found her on this porch, alone, on the swing over there, listening to music drifting up from the high school. It had probably been sometime in that year before he left.

He’d been rushing somewhere, though it was funny how that somewhere had seemed so important at the time, but he couldn’t remember it now.

But he could remember the look on her face as clearly as if it had happened yesterday.

“What’s up?” he’d asked her.

“Nothing.”

“Come on. You can’t lie to me, Sweet Pea. How come you aren’t at the school dance?”

“It’s the Sweetheart Prom,” she said and then her face had crumpled even as her chin had tilted proudly. “Nobody asked me to go.”

At nineteen what did a guy know about tears except that he didn’t want to be anywhere around them? A better person than nineteen-year-old him had been might have dropped his other plans, changed clothes, taken her to the prom.

But he hadn’t. He had chucked her on the chin, told her proms rated pretty high on the stupid scale and gotten on with his own life.

Brand thought suddenly of all those cute letters she had sent him when he’d joined up, when he’d been posted overseas. His one-gal fan club. The envelopes always decorated with stickers and different colored inks, the contents unintentionally hilarious enough that he had read every word.

Never answered any, though. Not even once.

Had her younger self waited by the mailbox, hoping?

So, maybe it was because he regretted doing the right thing by her only when it was convenient for him back then that he made a decision now. He owed her something. A smidgen of decency, compassion in a hard world.

Being undercover had taught him to read situations, and this one was obviously going as badly for her as it was going well for Gregg.

It felt like the most natural thing in the world to rescue Sophie.

“I think Sophie’s going to have to say no,” Brand said smoothly. “I’m only here for a little while. We don’t want to waste any of our time together, do we, honey?”

He turned to look at her. She was no actress. If Slick Hamilton saw her mouth hanging open in shock, he’d know the truth.

And Brand didn’t want him to know the truth. That she still loved Gregg Slick Hamilton. Or thought she did.

There was one way they both could find out.

He caught her cute little puffy bottom lip with his. Touched it, ran his tongue along it, made her world only about him.

It was probably a sin how much he liked it, but Brand was pretty sure his place was reserved in hell, anyway.

And the kiss accomplished exactly what he wanted.

Sophie was staring at him with wide-eyed awareness as if Gregg had vaporized into a speck in front of them. She licked her lip and her eyes had gone all smoky with longing.

Nope.

No matter what she might have convinced herself, she didn’t love Gregg Hamilton and never had.

Not that Brand considered himself any kind of an expert on love.

Lips, though, that was quite another thing.

And he liked hers. A whole lot more than he’d expected to. His sense of having sinned deeply grew more acute.

“Well, Sophie,” the swagger was completely gone out of Gregg’s voice, “You know you’re welcome to come. Bring your new friend with you.”

The invitation was issued now with the patent insincerity of a man who saw something he’d been using to puff himself up disappearing before his eyes.

“We might just do that,” Brand said easily.

Gregg got in his car and roared away, spitting stones as if they proved his testosterone levels were substantially higher than those of the next guy.

Brand committed to getting rid of his own sports car sooner rather than later.

“Were they to swine for?” Hilde demanded, mixing German and English.

“What?” Sophie asked, dazed.

“His lips!”

“No. Yes.” She closed her eyes, gathered herself and then looked sternly at her grandmother. “Stop.”

And then she turned to Brand. The dazed expression was completely gone from her face.

“What did you do that for?” she demanded.

He tried not to smile. The girl was transparent! It was written all over her that she was torn between yes and no, stop and go, hitting him or thanking him.

And it was written all over her that that kiss had rocked her tidy world in a way she would never want him to know. But then again, he didn’t really want her to suspect it had rocked his, too.

“Your ex was just gloating over your discomfort at his arrival a little too much,” he said quietly. “It bugged me.”

“How did you know he was my ex?” she asked, aghast.

“I’m good at reading people,” he said. He didn’t add that it was a survival mechanism, that over the past few years his life had depended on that skill. “I’m glad about the ex part, Sophie. I didn’t care for him much.”

Her grandmother snickered with approval and Sophie shot her a quelling look.

“You only saw him for thirty seconds!”

“Like I said,” he lifted a shoulder elaborately, “I have a gift for reading people.”

“He looked like a good kisser,” her grandmother insisted in German.

“Stop it!” Sophie said in English.

“Stop what?” Brand asked innocently.

She looked him straight in the face. “Stop rescuing me, Brand. I’m not fifteen anymore. I don’t need your help with my personal affairs.”

She blushed when she said affairs in just about the way she had when she’d said dork all those years ago, as if she was fifteen and had just used a risqué word. It was very sweet. She was very sweet. The kind of girl he knew nothing about.

She was right. He needed to stop rescuing her.

“It was just an impulse,” he said. “It won’t happen again.”

She struggled to look composed. Instead she looked crushed.

“Unless you want it to,” he couldn’t resist tossing out silkily.

“I want it to,” Hilde said, all in English. She reached across the table, touched Brand’s hand. The mischief was gone from her eyes. “The whole town is whispering about my Sophie and him. I’d much rather they whispered about my Sophie and you.”

Chapter Four

SOPHIE was still stuck on the unless you want it to part. Good God, she thought, she might be super-nerd of national-speech-contest fame, but of course she wanted it to. Happen again.

Sophie’s lips were tingling from being kissed. She felt exactly like a princess who had been sleeping, the touch of those lips bringing her fully to life. She was aware some part of her had waited, longed for, wanted what had just happened since she was a scrawny flat-chested teen in braces and glasses.

His lips had tasted of passion and promises and of worlds she had never been to. Had not even known existed. Places she wanted desperately, suddenly, now that she did know of their existence, to visit.

Who wouldn’t want more of that?

But, unless she was mistaken, Brand was enjoying her discomfort as much as he had just accused Gregg of doing.

Men!

Not that any man could hold a candle to her grandmother, who apparently felt driven to share with Brand Sophie’s closely guarded secret, that she was somehow becoming pathetic.

Sophie struggled through her embarrassment to remember her mission last night. To be free of all her romantic notions and nonsense.

She wasn’t letting Mr. Brand Sheridan think she was still the starry-eyed fifteen-year-old she had once been.

She wasn’t letting him know that one tiny ultra-casual brushing of lips had her ready to pack her bags and travel to unknown territory.

No! Sophie Holtzheim was taking back control and she was doing it right now. If Brand thought she was weak and pathetic and in need of his big, strong, arrogant self to rescue her, he’d better think again!

But Brand was looking at her grandmother, and suddenly he didn’t look as if he was enjoying her discomfort over that kiss.

“It’s a bad thing to lose face in a small town,” he said quietly.

“Yes!” her grandmother crowed, delighted that he had understood her so completely.

“It would be good for Sophie to have a romance so heated it would make the whole town forget she ever knew him,” Brand said thoughtfully

“Yes!” Her grandmother was beaming at his astuteness.

“Okay, I’ll do it,” Brand said, casually, as if he had agreed to his good deed for the day.

“Do what?” Sophie demanded.

“Romance you.”

“You will not!”

“It will convince Gregg and the whole town that you’re over him,” Brand said with aggravating confidence, as if it was already decided.

“It’s deceptive,” Sophie said, and then realized that wasn’t the out-and-out no that such an outlandish suggestion deserved.

“It could be fun,” Brand said.

“I doubt that.”

He raised an eyebrow at her in clear challenge. And then said, softly, “What are you afraid of?”

Now the only way she was going to show him she wasn’t the least bit afraid of what had just happened between them was if she said yes. If she protested this idea too strenuously, he might know the truth: she was terrified of him and his ability to tear her safe little world so far apart she might never succeed in putting it back together.

But she had to admit there was something wonderfully seductive about saving face. It really was horrible to be branded as pathetic in a small town.

“Well, Brand,” she said slowly, thoughtfully, “maybe we could have a little fake fling, under carefully orchestrated circumstances, of course.”

“And let me guess,” he said wryly, “you will be in charge of orchestrating the circumstances?”

If she was going to do this, and she had a sinking feeling that she was, she had to maintain absolute control over the situation.

He watched her, some challenge lighting the sapphire depths of his eyes until they sparkled like falling stars in a night sky. It was a look that could take away a woman’s courage. It could intimidate. It could shake her belief that she could be in control of everything. Or anything.

If she allowed it to, that was, if she hadn’t just vowed in front of her own burning dreams she was going to be a different kind of woman from now on.

The take-charge kind.

“How long are you going to be here, Brand?” she asked, keeping her voice all business.

“Maybe a month. I’ve got a lot of leave built up.”

“A month?” his father sputtered, and then sent Hilde an aggrieved look that Sophie easily interpreted as his son’s presence in his life cramping his romantic ambitions.

Brand’s eyes narrowed on his father for a moment, then he glanced at Hilde.

Hilde, naturally, looked unabashedly delighted at Brand’s announcement of a longterm stay in Sugar Maple Grove. It was written all over her face that she was already planning Brand and Sophie’s wedding.

And an adorable little house filled with babies. She hoped Hilde wouldn’t say it, not even in German. Because her grandmother was known to say anything, commenting on Brand’s kissing abilities being a case in point. What kind of grandmother did that?

Sophie slid Brand a look. The full force of his attention was back on her. Well, there was no denying he was a good kisser and would produce perfect babies. But if she wanted to stay in control of the perilous situation she was moving herself toward, she’d better not go there!

“What are you going to do here for a month?” Dr. Sheridan asked sulkily. “You’ll be bored in three days. Ha. Maybe in three hours.”

Once, Sophie knew, Brand would have risen to the bait, argued whether what his father said was true or not, and it probably was. He had been hotheaded, impulsive, impatient.

Now, there was something new in him, something coolly disciplined that made him both harder to read and more intriguing.

Brand just shrugged and said, “It’ll probably take me a month to fix everything in your house that is broken.”

She looked between the two men, and saw it wasn’t just the house that needed fixing.

Sophie could feel her head starting to ache. Those Sheridan men were probably going to need her help to navigate the minefield between them.

Great. She was going to have to do that while never letting Brand know how that kiss had rattled her world. How him sitting beside her on a sleepy Sunday morning made her feel aware and alive.

But, she reminded herself, this was exactly what she needed. To prove to herself she wasn’t fifteen anymore, the mere whiff of him enough to make her waste her life dreaming of happily-ever-afters. No, she was all grown up now and immune to his charm, considerable as that was.

Once she did that, longing for things that didn’t exist wouldn’t have the power to ruin her life anymore.

She could be a realist, dismiss that longing for something. It wouldn’t be there, like a villain waiting in the wings, ready to rain disaster on her well-planned future and life.

But she knew she was playing with fire. Because that something was exactly what she had tasted on his lips.

Walk into it, girl, she ordered herself. If you want to play with fire, walk straight into the flame. There would be nothing like a dose of reality to kill her fantasies forever.

“Well, Brand,” she said, taking that mental leap off Blue Rock, “since you’re going to be here, you might as well help me out. It’s true, this whole town thinks I’m pining away for my ex-fiancé, Gregg, who is about to become officially engaged to someone else.”

“Are you?” he asked softly.

“Of course not!” But she could feel a blush rising up her neck as she said it, and she could see she had not convinced him.

She took a deep breath, walked straight into the fire. “So, I’ll accept your offer. Yes, you can pretend to be my beau.”

It was like falling straight off a cliff. And no one hated heights more than she did!

“Beau?” he said, and then laughed. “Who uses a word like that in this day and age? I think you’ve been spending just a little too much time at the Historical Society, Sweet Pea.”

“You are every bit as annoying as I remember!” she said, exasperated. It was hard enough for her to keep her dignity while accepting his offer.

“You never thought I was annoying,” he said with the silky and aggravating confidence of a man who, unfortunately, women did not find annoying. Ever.

“Remember the time you said you were going to the library and I gave you my books to return and you didn’t?”

“I wasn’t really going to the library,” he said.

“Whatever. Annoying. Six dollars in fines.”

“Your only brush with the law?”

She ignored him. “And how about the time you showed up at my door with a kitten two minutes before I was supposed to be leaving for band camp?”

“You loved that kitten,” he said, with a grin.

She had. The gift had melted her.

“That’s not the point. The point is that I was late for band camp, and so I didn’t get the instrument I wanted, and I had to play the tuba for a whole week and it was your fault.”

“Band camp is for nerds.”

“My point exactly,” she said, triumphantly. “You are annoying! Supremely! You will have to try and keep that in check as we conduct our—” She couldn’t bring herself to say romance. “—arrangement.”

“Do you still play the tuba?” he asked sweetly. “Didn’t you send me a recording? When I was in basic?”

Sophie could feel her face getting very hot. “I didn’t!”

“Uh-huh. A tuba solo. A love song.”

“It wasn’t a tuba,” she said petulantly. “Clarinet. My instrument of choice.”

He raised a wicked, wicked eyebrow at her.

How could he do this? Instrument was not a dirty word!

“Never mind,” Sophie said. “I just realized how rash it was to agree to this. I’m not sure I’m desperate enough to have you for my beau, even temporarily.”

“Aw, shucks,” he said. “Just when I was starting to think it might be fun. Like porcu-pine-wrestling in my birthday suit.”

He had inserted that reference deliberately to see if he could make her blush again.

And damn him, he could.

“Are you backing out?” she demanded.

“No, I think you are.”

“I’m not!”

“Ha,” Dr. Sheridan muttered, “I’d be interested to see if the all-important Brand Sheridan, secret agent, would do anything as selfless as help an old neighbor so she could hold her head up high again. Trust me, Sophie, it’s not in my son’s nature to do the decent thing.”

Sophie felt shocked at the doctor’s bitter tone, and she saw Brand flinch as if he’d been struck.

She had found the bantering back and forth between her and Brand edgy, but playful, dan-gerously invigorating.

Now the tension that leapt in the air between him and his father was painful and tangible.

But again, the young man who would have risen to the bait, defended himself or argued, was not part of who Brand was now. Instead he replied, disciplined patience in his voice, “I’m just a soldier. I do what I’m told, when I’m told. I was on an undercover assignment. I was told I wouldn’t be granted leave. Period.”

“Whatever,” his father said.

“If I could have been here, I would have.”

“Whatever,” his father said again.

“And if Sophie agrees, we’ll do this thing.”

She felt the flutter of her heart. It wasn’t a good idea. To play a charade for the whole town was a stupid, impulsive idea that fell solidly into the category of really dumb things that she always did around him.

But could she walk away from giving Brand a perfect opportunity to redeem himself a tiny bit in his father’s eyes while he was here?

It would help her, it would help him.

Even now, he and his father were eyeing each other balefully.

And she felt compelled to insert herself between them, to ease the tension.

“I’ll do it,” she announced decisively.

“Oh, goody,” her grandmother said.

“Oh, brother,” his father said.

“Oh,” Brand said, then, “great.” Spoken with the macho bravado of a man who had been chosen from many to diffuse a bomb.

“Let’s talk romance,” Sophie suggested brightly. “I’ll come up with a plan. A few highly visible activities: ice cream at Maynard’s, maybe a bike ride or two, an appearance at Blue Rock and then—ta-da—you and I at the engagement party.”

Brand watched her talk, ruefully aware she was trying to ease the tension between him and his father. She’d been like that as a kid, too. Always wanting everything to look like a Norman Rockwell painting.

Sugar Maple Grove lent itself to that.

But now Sophie was not a kid. Not if those lips had spoken the truth about her, and he was pretty sure they had.

He was also ruefully aware that, despite her engagement and the promise of those lips, Sophie still seemed to be a sweet geek in the romance department. A plan? What kind of romance had a plan?

A fake one, he reminded himself sternly.

Brand was struck by a tingling awareness along the back of his neck. It was his sharply honed instinct. It always warned him when danger was near.

He had done many, many dangerous things.

But he doubted any of them were going to hold a candle to pretending to be Miss Sophie Holtzheim’s beau.

Why had he agreed to this?

Partly because he couldn’t resist protecting Sophie. It seemed that’s what he had been born to do, protect.

It was going to be a long, hot month in Sugar Maple Grove, and a man couldn’t be faulted for finding a way to entertain himself.

His father, with one last look at him, not friendly, shoved back his chair. “I’m going to be late for church.”

“Oh, that time already?” Hilde said in English, and in German, “We’ll leave you two alone, Sophie. Do something romantic, for God’s sake.”

In a flurry of activity his dad and Hilde left and it was suddenly so quiet he could hear birds singing and bees buzzing.

He waited to see if Sophie would do something romantic. Sophie, predictably, did nothing of the sort.

“Don’t you have a girlfriend who’s going to object to this?” she asked. It sounded like an effort—albeit a weak one—to find a way out.

“I don’t have a girlfriend,” he said. “This job busts people up. It’s too hard on the ones left behind. I was undercover for four years. Can you imagine what that would do to a woman?”

“The right one would be okay with it,” she said with an edge of stubbornness. “It’s not just what you do. It’s who you are.”

“Well, who I am can’t just drop everything for the birthday or wedding anniversary. You get in too deep to be pulled out. Sometimes you have to pretend to have a wife or a girlfriend. Another agent plays the role. How does the woman waiting at home handle that?”

“Badly,” she guessed.

“Exactly.”

“I guess that overcomes the girlfriend thing.”

“I guess it does.”

“If we do this right,” she said, “maybe your father won’t be quite so antagonistic toward you.”

On the other hand, Brand thought, if he did more damage than good, he would confirm his father’s worst thoughts about him.

“I don’t understand why he’s not proud of you,” Sophie said.

He didn’t like it that she cut so quickly to his own feelings. Why was it a man never quite got over that longing to be something good in the eyes of his father? To make his family proud?

“There was only one way to make my father proud of me,” he said, “and I didn’t do it. I didn’t go to medical school and become a doctor willing to take over the Sugar Maple Grove General Practice one day.”

“I still remember how shocked your parents were when you quit college and joined the military.”

“My dad can trace eight generations of Sheridans. The men are doctors, professors, writers. And then along came me. I couldn’t fit the mold he made for me.”

“But the marines?”

“A recruiter at college found me on a climbing wall and asked if I’d ever considered making a living doing something like that. He made the whole thing sound irresistibly exciting.”

“And has it been?”

Brand was aware it was so easy to talk to Sophie. “It’s been pretty much what I told your grandmother. Ninety-nine percent tedium, one percent all hell breaking loose.”

Sophie smiled. “And you live for that one percent. Adrenaline junkie.”

“You know, that’s the part my mom and dad never understood. The military is a good place for an adrenaline junkie. I’ve always been attracted to adventure. I’ve always needed the adrenaline rush. Left to my own devices, especially in my younger years, that could have gotten me in a lot of trouble. I needed to balance my love of height and speed with discipline and skill.

“But my dad can’t forgive me my career choice. We were a long way down the road of not seeing eye to eye even before I missed my mom’s funeral.”

“Was there really no way for you to come home, Brand? None?”

He shook his head. “You have to understand how deeply I was in and how long it took me to get there. Word of my mom’s death reached me via a quick and risky meeting with my handler—that’s your contact with the real world. The less you see anybody from that world, the better.

“At that point in the operation, I had to assume everything was suspect, everything was listened to, everything was watched. One wrong step, one wrong breath could have gotten people killed, could have blown nearly four years of work.

“What I said to my dad was true. I’m basically a soldier. I take orders. Even if it had been my call, which it wasn’t, I wouldn’t have jeopardized the team. Couldn’t.

“And I’ll tell you what else I couldn’t have done—risked someone following me back here, knowing anything about this place or the people in it, retribution for what I was about to do raining down on the innocent.”

Her eyes were wide. “Did you ever tell that to your father?”

“He doesn’t listen long enough.” Brand was surprised by just how much he’d told Sophie. He usually didn’t talk about work. He usually carried his burdens alone.

“Are you in danger now?” she asked, always intuitive.

But he’d said enough, there was no sense scaring her. He sidestepped the question. “My identity will be protected, even in the coming court cases. I’ll be kept pretty low-profile for a long time.”

His father didn’t know about that kind of world, and neither did Sophie Holtzheim. If he told them all the details, if they fully understood the danger, they might feel the kind of helpless fear that tore apart the ones who stayed at home.

Better his father be angry than that.

And her? He could never subject someone as sweet and sensitive as Sophie to what he did for a living. Was this brief tangling of their lives—him entertaining himself at her expense—going to hurt her?

It was going to be just like being undercover. Get the job done, no emotional attachment, keep mental distance. Pretend.

He looked at Sophie, so adorable in her earnestness. Pretense around someone so transparent, so genuine, seemed wrong. Still, it bugged him that she wasn’t able to hold her head high, so he listened without comment as she outlined her plans for a romance.

Ice cream. A bike ride or two. Blue Rock.

Again, he was struck by the innocence of it all. He felt a flicker of trepidation about his ability to play the role she was outlining. But he didn’t let on.

“Sure,” he agreed to all her plans when she finally stopped and looked at him with wide-eyed expectation. He took a big bite of his mar-malade-covered croissant. “That should be fun.”

He remembered, too late, he too hated marmalade.

But just for practice at concealing how he really felt, he chewed thoughtfully and proclaimed it delicious.

Sophie was looking at him as if she didn’t believe him. What if she proved to be the person who could see right through all the masks he’d become so adept at wearing?

For some reason that thought was scarier than the four years he had just spent in a den full of rattlesnakes.

Because it threatened him as he had never once allowed himself to be threatened.

It went to the core he’d kept hidden.

What if Sophie Holtzheim could see his heart?

No worries, he tried to tell himself. He thought of the work he’d done. Four years building friendships. Building trust. He’d worked with those people, partied with them, attended the baptisms of their children and the marriages of the their daughters.

His work had culminated in twenty-three arrests in four different countries. Bad guys, yes, but also people he had come to know on a different level: sons, husbands, fathers.

His own father probably knew the truth about him after all—Brand Sheridan’s heart was as black as the ace of spades.

Early the next morning, Brand was working in his father’s backyard, trying to clear the shambles his mother’s rosebeds had become.

Nobody had to know that this is how he would honor her. Bring back something she had loved that now looked sorry and neglected. Who knew? Maybe with enough work it could be ready for next year’s garden tour.

He was just blotting an angry, bleeding welt from a thorn when he got that hair-rising-on-the-back-of-his-neck feeling.

He turned slightly. The red hat was highly visible through the hedge. He smiled to himself. He was being watched.

“You must come see,” Hilde called in German. “He’s taken off his shirt.”

He had taken off his shirt, even though the morning was cool, because the thorns were ripping it to tatters.

“Grandma!”

But out of the corner of his eye, he could see Sophie could not resist the temptation and had joined her grandmother at the hedge

He flexed a muscle for them, tried not to smile at the grandma’s gasp of appreciation, pretended he had no idea they were there.

“He’s bleeding,” Hilde whispered, still in German. “You should bring him a Band-Aid.”

“Stop it,” Sophie said.

“Go over there,” her grandma hissed.

“No.”

“Ach. You have no idea how to conduct a romance.”

“I do so. I was nearly married.”

“Ha. Being flattered that someone pays attention to you is not the same as being romanced.”

Brand knew it. Sophie hadn’t been in love. She hadn’t even been infatuated. She’d been flattered.

He picked up his shirt, wiped the sweat off with it, wandered over to the hedge, peered through it as if he was surprised to see them there.

“Hey, ladies, nice morning.”

“Oh, Brand,” Sophie said, and squeezed through the little gap in the hedge where she had made her escape the other night.

Or, from the annoyed glance back at the bobbing red hat, maybe she’d been pushed through it.

She was dressed for work. She looked as if she worked at a library, but he thought it was probably safe to assume the Historical Society would provide the same dusty-tomes atmosphere.

Her remarkable auburn hair had been pinned up, she was wearing a white shirt with a fine navy pinstripe, a stern, straight-line navy blue skirt and flat shoes.

She had her glasses on, making her reminiscent of the national-speech-contest girl she had once been.

Only now there was a twist.

Sophie was all grown up, and he was stunned to discover he harbored a librarian fantasy. It made his mouth go dry thinking of slipping those glasses off her face, pulling the pins from her hair, flicking open the top button of that primly fastened-to-the-throat blouse.

She intensified his commitment to the fantasy when she stared at him as if she was a sheltered little librarian, who had never seen a half-naked man before. She gulped, looked wildly back at the little hole in the hedge.

She brought out the sinner in him, because he was wickedly delighted in her discomfort. He folded his arms over his chest.

“You’re bleeding,” her grandmother coached, through the hedge, in German.

“You’re, uh, very tanned,” Sophie blurted out uncomfortably.

“I lived on a yacht in Spain.”

“That was your undercover job?”

“Yes.”

So many things she could have said: Was it glamorous? What’s Spain like? Why a yacht? What was it like to live there? Were you pretending to be rich and famous? What did you do every day? Who were you trying to catch?

But she asked none of those.

She said, her eyes suddenly quiet on his face, “Were you afraid?”

Until this very moment, he hadn’t thought so. But now, standing here in the quiet of the garden with her, the birds singing riotously in the trees, the odd bee buzzing by, he felt the complete absence of fear. And he felt a different kind of tension from the kind he had learned to live with, day in and day out, for four long years.

A delightful tension. A man aware of a woman. A woman aware of a man.

“I guess I was afraid,” he admitted slowly. He wondered if he had ever said those words to another human being. It felt as though a vital piece of his armor fell away from him.

Not It must have been exciting. “It must have been unbelievably difficult.”

He scrambled for the piece of fallen armor, grinned at her, flexed a muscle and was satisfied when her little tongue flicked out and gave the corner of her lip a nervous lick.

“Nah,” he said, “just a job.”

But despite the distraction, her eyes on his face were still quiet, knowing.

He hated that. “What happened to your engagement?” he asked, moving her away from the topic of him.

He hoped she wasn’t going to tell him something that would make him have to hunt down her ex and have a little talk with him.

Sophie looked wildly uncomfortable.

“I should know,” he encouraged her. “As your new beau, I should know why the last guy was dumb enough to ditch you.”

“He didn’t ditch me,” she squeaked. “I told him I needed some time to think. While I was thinking, he was hunting. For my replacement.”

Something in Brand whispered softly and entirely against his will, as if you could replace a girl like her! “What did you need to think about?”

Her eyes fastened on his naked bicep, he flexed it for her. She licked her lips.

“I don’t know, exactly. Something was missing.”

“Well, then you’re a smart girl for calling it off.”

“Do you really think so?”

“Really.” Even he was surprised by how much he meant that. “You know, your parents were good, good people. They really loved each other, Sophie. Maybe you felt desperate to have what you had lost.”

She looked stunned. He was a little shocked himself. Where had that observation come from?

“Ah, well,” she said, looking away, finally, “I’m just on my way to work, but I thought I should let you know I’ve formalized the plan.”

She looked faintly relieved that there were actually neat papers in her hand, an escape from the intensity of the moment and the understanding that had just passed between them.

“I was just going to drop them in the mailbox, but since you’re here—

Deliciously flustered, she thrust several sheets of neatly folded paper at him and ducked back through the hedge.

“You didn’t say he was bleeding,” her grandmother scolded in German. “A little first aid!”

“It wasn’t life-threatening,” Sophie said. “I’m late for work.”

“I fear you are hopeless,” her grandmother muttered.

He unfolded the sheets Sophie had handed him and sighed. He feared her grandmother might be right.

Under the boldface heading, Courtship Itinerary, Sophie had typed a neat schedule for their romance. It was obviously an effort to keep their arrangement all business, which a part of him applauded, though a different part became fiendishly more committed to shaking her safe librarian/historian world.

Tuesday: 7:00 p.m., bike to Maynard’s, ice cream.

Friday: 7:30 p.m., movie at the old Tivoli.

Sunday: 3:00 p.m., swim at Blue Rock, weather permitting.

For a man who had taken weekend trips to Monte Carlo to gamble, attended yacht parties on unbelievably outfitted luxury craft, who had been wined and dined in some of the most famous restaurants in the world, her plan should have been laughable. This is what she had come up with for excitement?

This was the courtship of Miss Sophie?

But oddly, Brand didn’t feel like laughing. He felt as if he was choking on something. The choices not made, a sweet way of life left behind.

He shuffled papers. The second sheet, also neatly typed and double-spaced, had the boldface title, Courtship Guidelines. As he scanned it, he realized it really meant Sophie’s rules, starting with no public demonstrations of affection and ending with the request that he not call her Sweet Pea.

“Oh, lady,” he said, crumpling up the rules, needing to regain his equilibrium, “you have so much to learn.”

Or maybe he did. Maybe he was being given a chance to experience a choice not made a long time ago. Maybe it would be kind of fun to pretend to have the life he had walked away from.

Whistling, aware he felt inordinately happy despite the fact he was dancing with danger of a new kind—ah, well, danger had always held an irresistible pull for him—Brand worked a bit longer in the roses and then took the rose clippers to where the sweet peas were running riot along his father’s back fence.

Though his mother had loved roses, Brand had always considered the sweet pea the loveliest flower she grew, in all its abundant and delicate pastel shades, the fragrance coming off those cheery blossoms like a little piece of heaven.

An overlooked flower, he thought, scorned by the serious gardeners who babied their roses and clipped their rhododendron bushes and pulled their dahlias in the fall.

Just like Sophie Holtzheim.

An overlooked flower.

When he’d clipped more sweet peas than he could hold in his arms, he went and filled the kitchen sink with water and dropped them in.

“What are you doing with my flowers?” his father asked grumpily, glancing up from his paper. His father apparently hadn’t noticed there was nothing for breakfast in the house.

“I’m going to start a rumor,” Brand said pleasantly. “And then I’m going to get some groceries. You want to come?”

“To start the rumor?” his father said hopefully.

“No, for the groceries. How come you don’t have any food?”

“Why? You writing a report for your sister?”

“She’s worried about you, Dad. You don’t have to see her as the enemy. That fire rattled her.”

“Rattled her! What do you think it did to me? Oh well, I didn’t like cooking here anyway. Or eating here,” Dr. Sheridan said, proud, reluctant. “It makes me miss your mother.”

“I miss her, too, Dad. I come in this kitchen and think of strawberry lemonade and cookies warm from the oven, the chocolate chips dripping.”

Something in his father’s face softened, and, briefly, it almost felt that they might have a moment, share some fond memories. But his father rattled the paper and dove behind it.

Brand headed for the shower.

Later he went out to the bike shed, and found his mother’s bike, complete with the basket which he filled with sweet peas until it overflowed. Then he rode right down Main Street, enjoying the pretense of being a small-town guy who had never, for the good of his country, done things that ate at his soul.

The thing that astonished him was how easy it was to slip from who he knew himself to be—a hardened warrior, heart of ice—into this role of a young man going to woo his girl.

Had he gotten that adept at playing roles?

At least this one had no grim, dark overtones. It just felt fun. It would be entertaining, fill up some of his time here, to play this game with Sophie. To break her rules, too.

Maybe, if nothing else, before he left here, he could teach Sophie to be spontaneous, though he doubted if he had enough time to tackle that particular challenge.

He parked the bicycle in front of the old two-story redbrick Edwardian building that housed the Historical Society, gathered the sweet peas in his arms, took the steps two at a time and stopped in front of the stern-faced woman at the reception desk in the outer office.

“I’m looking for my sweet pea,” he announced, “Miss Sophie.”

That would show Sophie Holtzheim just how sick and tired he was of other people making the rules that governed his life. He was on leave from his military duties. He wasn’t taking orders from a little scrap of a girl!

Not unless they were the delicious kind. The librarian pulling her glasses off, chewing thoughtfully on the arm, watching him with heat in her eyes.

Brand Sheridan, he berated himself, there is a special place in hell for guys like you.

On second thought, he was already there.

The idea that this was going to be some kind of fun fled from him. He couldn’t be sworn to help and protect Sophie and have these kinds of thoughts at the same time.

He needed to be a better man.

The courtship of Sophie was probably going to be the hardest assignment of his life.

Chapter Five

“YOU have a gentleman caller,” Bitsy Martin whispered in the door of Sophie’s office. “With flowers.”

Sophie felt a blush rise up her cheeks. Of course, given how recently she had drawn up her rules of courtship engagement, her gentleman caller could be only one person!

And of all the words she had ever used to describe Brand, and there had been many of them, most recently pirate, the word gentleman had never been on the list.

She didn’t know which was more annoying: the fact that Brand had dispensed with her schedule, or the fact that Bitsy looked so amazed that a man would show up with flowers for her.

She didn’t feel ready to deal with him. She still felt the stunning truth Brand Sheridan had so casually unearthed this morning.

She had been going to marry Gregg Hamilton because she missed her parents, had missed being part of that unit called a family.

Thank God he had not uncovered the whole truth. She was only just working toward that herself, and it was painful.

“I thought he was in the wrong place. He’s what we would have called a rake back in the day,” Bitsy confided. “Devilishly charming.”

Again, there was something mildly insulting about Bitsy’s disbelief that such a man would show up looking for her.

Sophie took a deep breath, got up and went down the hall. She tried to steel herself, but, of course, it was impossible.

The sweet-pea bouquet, abandoned on the counter, had already filled the entire office with its delicate fragrance. Brand had his back to her, restless, pacing, pretending to be interested in the old photos of Sugar Maple Grove that graced the walls.

Sophie fought the desire just to stop and drink in the sweeping masculine lines of that broad back, especially since Bitsy was watching.

Wait. That’s the whole idea. To convince people we’re actually interested in each other. Sophie could study the enticing lines of his back as long as she wanted. It was a heady freedom, as intoxicating as champagne, so she only allowed herself the tiniest sip before she cleared her throat.

“Brand,” she said, her brightness forced, “An unexpected pleasure. What brings you here?”

She realized Bitsy was hovering with avid interest, and that for a girl who was supposed to be being romanced she sounded ridiculously formal. Her eyes skittered to the sweet peas. “My darling,” she added as an afterthought. It sounded as if she had read a line from a script, badly.

He turned from the pictures on the wall and gazed at her, long and slow. He was going to be good at this! Way too good. Despite the fact that he said he had no girlfriends, she now suspected something else—dozens, hundreds of women wooed by the man with the perfect excuse to never commit!

He came back to the counter, leaned across it and planted a rather noisy—and distinctly demonstrative—kiss on her cheek.

“Ma chérie,” he greeted her, his voice as liquid and sweet as warmed wild honey. It was as if he’d poured that honey over her naked body when he said something else in French, that she didn’t understand but that was undoubtedly wicked.

“You don’t speak French,” she protested weakly to him.

“Actually, I do.”

“I didn’t know that.” A French-speaking pirate. Whatever forces she had called down upon herself to test her sworn-off-love vow by burning pictures at midnight were extraordinarily powerful ones!

“There is quite a bit about me you don’t know.” How could he do that? That phrase was not dirty.

That was true. The boy next door had always been safe. Even in the darkest throes of her crush on him, there had never been the remotest chance of her love being requited. That had made it so safe somehow. Now, everything seemed different.

Especially him, something the same and something different meeting somewhere where she could not clearly see the lines, could not clearly discern the dangers.

“What did you say in French?”

“Just that I saw these flowers and they reminded me of you.”

“Oh.” Her cheek could not possibly be tingling! Sophie had to resist an impulse to reach up and touch her cheek where his lips had been.

“You want to go for lunch?”

“No!” Her voice sounded strangled.

He raised a wicked eyebrow at her, enjoying her discomfort, a pirate enjoying the game, enjoying his pretense of being a perfect gentleman.

“Of course you want to come for lunch with me,” he coached her in a whisper, “you can’t get enough of me.”

Unfortunately, true.

“It’s not lunchtime.”

“That would not stop two people who were falling in love.”

His eyes twinkled, a little grin tickled the sensuous curve of lips that had just touched her cheek. That she had tasted yesterday. That she wanted to taste again, with the desperate hunger of a woman who was falling hard and fast.

She’d always been way too susceptible to him. Always. It was time to claim her life back. Really. Past time.

Pull it together, girl, Sophie ordered herself. “Even if it is lunchtime, I couldn’t possibly. Too busy.” She heard Bitsy’s muffled gasp of dismay, remembered they had a witness and that was what this was really all about.

It could only mean trouble that Sophie was aware of the growing disappointment that this was all an act, a role she had, very stupidly, encouraged him to play.

“What are you busy doing, Sweet Pea?” he asked, silkily, smooth, his eyes intent on her face, his fingers moving along the countertop, touching hers. He did a funny little thing with his fingertips, dancing them along her knuckles, feather-light, astonishingly intimate.

Instead of being pleased with his performance, Sophie wanted to cry. What had she gotten herself into? What woman wouldn’t want a moment like this to be real?

His fingertips tickled her, drummed an intimate little tattoo across the top of her hand, rested on the bone of her wrist.

Sophie’s belly did that roller-coaster dive.

Unless she was mistaken, Bitsy gasped again, not with dismay but with recognition of something white-hot streaking through the stale air of the historical office—sexy, seductive.

“A box of memorabilia came in,” Sophie stammered, and yanked her hand away. She brushed it across the top of her thigh, to make the tingling stop.

Brand’s attention was on her hand, a faint smug smile of male knowing on a face that was just a little too sure of his ability to tempt, entice, seduce.

Unfortunately echoing what she had seen in Bitsy’s face. Men like him didn’t woo girls like her! Or use words like woo either, or as old-fashioned, as prissy, as archaic as beau.

Sophie had always been out of step. The sweet geek, walking dictionary, history buff, plagued by a certain awkward uncertainty in herself that she had managed to put away for ten minutes once to give a speech, but otherwise had never quite outgrown.

People didn’t get why she had trouble getting over Gregg. No man had really ever noticed her before, and she despaired that one ever would again.

Except Brand.

He’d always noticed her. But in that aggravating, chuck-you-on-the-chin, you’re-cute-and-funny-like-a-chimpanzee-who-can-ride-a-tricycle kind of way.

And Brand Sheridan? She had always noticed him, too, and not in the chimpanzee-on-a-trike kind of way.

He had always been hot. Not just good-looking, because really, good looks, while rare and certainly enticing, were not a measure of character. It wasn’t even the fact that he had carried himself with such confidence, that he had radiated the mysterious male essence that stole breath as surely as bees stole nectar.

No, Brand had had a way of looking at people, and engaging with people that made them feel as if he could show them the secret to being intensely alive. There was something about him that had been bold and breathtaking.

In high school he had gone for the fast girls, Sophie remembered, a little more sadly than she would have liked. There had been a constant parade of them on the backseat of his motorcycle. Girls who were sophisticated and flirty, who knew how to wear makeup and how to dress in ways that men went gaga for.

She remembered she had tried to tell him once he was way too smart for that. That he should find a girl he could talk to.

What she had meant was a girl who was worthy of him. Such as herself.

If she recalled, he had thrown back his head and laughed at her advice, chucked her on the chin, said Why do I need another girl to talk to, when I have you?

Naturally, naive little fool that she had been, that off-the-cuff remark had sent her into infatuation overdrive.

He still thought she was that girl! And she was not doing one thing to set him straight!

It was stopping now. Sophie was not going to give him the satisfaction of being right! Even if he was!

Sophie pulled her hand away from her thigh and folded both her hands primly on the counter in front of her. She realized the gesture was a little too old for her.

It was time for a new Sophie to emerge, a woman who was not intimidated by the likes of him—or who could at least pull off the pretense that she wasn’t!

She leaned forward and purred, “Beloved, as happy as I am to see you, I must go back to work. I’m swamped. Simply swamped.”

Out of all the endearments she could have picked, she kicked herself for choosing that one! Hopelessly dated. And fraught with emotion. Beloved.

To lean toward him and mean it. To let it be the last word on her lips at night and the first in the morning, to let it form in her mind when her eyes rested on him, even from a distance…

“Go away,” she snapped at him, when he didn’t seem to be getting it.

Another gasp from Bitsy. It was like working with her grandmother. Sophie turned and gave her a glare that she hoped would send her scuttling, but Bitsy stood her ground.

Feeling her hand was being forced, she leaned even closer, and tried to take the sting out of the “Go away.”

“I’ll make it up to you later.” She blinked at him in her best version of the type of girl who had graced the back of his motorcycle.

A smile tickled those handsome lips. Unfortunately she couldn’t tell if she’d managed to amuse him or intrigue him just the tiniest bit.

“I can help you with your work,” he suggested, “and then we can go for lunch. Or we can go some place where you can make it up to me, whichever you prefer.”

Done playing, Sophie picked up the sweet peas, opened the gate that separated the inner office from the outer one and let him through. She pointed down the hall and then marched behind him.

“That one,” she said tersely.

He went into her open office, and she slid in behind him and then shut the door. With a snap.

She leaned against it trying to marshal herself.

There was no room for them both in her office, he had turned around to face her and was now leaning his rear up against her desk, arms folded over the solidness of his chest, eyes dancing with mischief and merriment.

At her expense.

His largeness made the room seem small and cramped. His vibrancy made the space—and her whole life—feel dull and dreary.

Her office was never going to feel the same now. Something of his larger-than-life presence was going to linger here and ruin it.

“What are you doing?” Sophie demanded.

He lifted a big shoulder, smiled. “Getting things started.”

“We were supposed to start with a bike ride. To Maynard’s. For ice cream. Tomorrow.”

Every word sounded clipped, a woman in distress, a woman who had had a plan, and that plan included somehow needing a whole day to prepare to be with him.

“Ah, Sophie,” he suggested, “lighten up. Be spontaneous.”

“I don’t like being spontaneous!” Wait! Remember the new Sophie!

“I seem to remember that,” he said sympathetically, “Never too late to learn.”

“I don’t want to learn!” Which was a lie. The new Sophie thought spontaneity could begin with throwing herself at him and tasting his lips again.

That would wipe the smug look off his face!

“That’s sad,” he said.

“I am not sad! I will not have you see me as pathetic!” The urge to kiss him grew, just to prove something.

But it could backfire. It could prove she was even more pathetic than she thought.

“I don’t see you as pathetic, Sophie, just…er…a little too rigid.”

Rigid? This was turning into a nightmare. The world’s most glorious man saw her as uptight and rigid? The new Sophie had to do something!

“Let’s have some fun with this,” he coaxed.

What could she say to that? She didn’t like having fun? Now she felt driven to prove to him that she was not uptight and rigid!

That she could be flexible and fun.

And of course she could be.

Taking a deep breath, Sophie launched herself over the distance that separated them in a fashion that allowed no chickening out. She caught the widening of his eyes, his quick lean backward, but the desk prevented escape. She wrapped her arms around his neck and pulled him close.

She took his lips with hers.

There, she thought dreamily. That should show him. Nothing rigid or predictable about her. She could be spontaneous! She could have as much fun as the next person.

For a moment his lips softened under hers, and the word fun dissolved. Fun was a Fourth of July picnic or a new puppy or a good game of Scrabble.

This wasn’t fun. It was intense. And dangerous. As exciting, as challenging as riding the rapids of an uncharted river or jumping from an airplane with a parachute that might or might not open.

This was part of her absolute gift for doing the wrong thing around him! She had set out to prove he didn’t have any power over her anymore.

And proved the exact opposite. Beloved.

Not that he had to know. Ever.

That his lips tasted to her of everything she had longed for when she had said yes to the wrong man and bought a wedding dress and collected pictures. Brand Sheridan’s lips tasted of honey and dreams, of dewdrops and hope.

She had said to Gregg that she needed time to think, that something was missing.

Sophie reeled back from Brand, feeling aquiver with recognition. The rest of the truth she had been trying to hide from herself slammed into her.

The truth was she had nearly married Gregg because she had never wanted to feel love as deeply as she had felt it within her family again. She had wanted to have the security of that place called family, without the emotional investment that could devastate so totally. That could shatter a person’s heart into a million jagged pieces. That could steal any semblance of remaining faith or hope from their soul.

Ultimately, Gregg had been safe. He would have never required her heart or her soul.

This man in front of her?

He would never be safe. And he would never accept less from the person he called beloved than their full heart, their complete soul.

Of course, with her gift for getting everything exactly wrong, here she was falling in love with the man least likely ever to call anyone beloved. The man who had made his work his built-in excuse for not loving anyone.

“There,” she said, hoping she did not sound as shaken as she felt. “Spontaneity requirement met?”

“Not unless we were talking about spontaneous combustion,” he muttered, his eyes as piercing as a pirate’s on her face. Still, Sophie could tell she had managed to shock him.

What she couldn’t tell was if it was in a good way. His eyes were unreadable, the mischief had gone from them.

She suddenly just wanted to hide.

If he had just followed the rules! If he had waited until tomorrow to go for ice cream instead of invading her world, he would have seen her at her most flexible. And fun.

She might have even managed flirty.

She might not have launched herself at him in a full-frontal attack! The sweet geek rides again! Gets it exactly wrong every time!

“Back to work,” she said firmly. What she meant was back to her hidey-hole: words and dusty archives, glimpses into worlds long past that triggered her imagination, that she could immerse herself in when her own life seemed way too dreary, when the disappointment of the gap between what she desired and what she could have were inescapable.

She was not going to cry. “Nice of you to drop by. This box of stuff just came in,” she fluttered a wrist at it, “and I need to go through it. It’s time-consuming. All the letters have to be read—”

“This box?” he said, glancing at her, seeing what she did not want him to see if his faintly worried look was any indication.

Brand Sheridan was probably thinking she was more pathetic than he had ever guessed!

Still, intentionally or not—she suspected it was—he gave her a bit of space to compose herself.

He turned from her, opened the lid of the box, peered in. “I can read the letters for you. World War Two, right? I can sort through anything that pertains to that.”

She could see him watching her quietly, waiting to see if she could accept his invitation to back up a bit, to get things back to normal.

How could it be normal after she had kissed him like that? With his big assured self taking all the air out of her space? Applying all that confidence and curiosity to her stuff and her world?

Get him out of here, the old Sophie ordered her.

The new Sophie asked how could she have a drop of pride left if she let him see how damned rattled she was by the kiss she had instigated?

“Fine,” she said, tightly. “We never turn down volunteer help. I understand you’ve been home in Sugar Maple Grove for nearly forty-eight hours. It’s inevitable that the boredom is setting in. Let me set you up in the conference room.”

She did. There. Now he could find out what boredom really was!

“Just keep out anything that pertains to the Second World War,” she instructed him sweetly. “Bitsy can sort through the rest later.”

And she closed the door firmly on him.

Brand found himself in the conference room, alone, the door shut on him. She’d done that deliberately, kissed him in retribution for his messing with her schedule, just to let him know what was going to happen if he messed with her—that she could be wild and unpredictable, too.

She couldn’t really. She was as transparent as a sheet of glass. His sweet little next-door neighbor trying to be something she was not, trying to erase her image as a bookworm, wallflower, librarian.

She’d be surprised by how much Brand liked that about her. Sophie, with all her awkwardness and intellect, was different in a world where so much was same old, same old—cookie-cutter women who looked the same and talked the same and were the same.

Didn’t Sophie know what a treat it was to unearth an original? He smiled. A long time ago, before she was even old enough to know anything about anything, she’d shown disdain for his taste in women.

Still, for all that he knew she was trying to prove something to him that she couldn’t, that kiss had been startling.

There had been something disturbingly wild and unpredictable in her lips meeting his for the second time.

What had he tasted?

Hunger.

More evidence that agreeing to romance Sophie had been about his worst idea ever.

Still, no wonder she’d fallen for the first guy to pay some attention to her. She wasn’t just lonely for the family she had lost.

Nope, she was hungry, there was a fire in that girl only one thing was going to put out.

And it wasn’t the fire that was roaring to life inside him just thinking about it. He hadn’t come here planning to burn up with her. No, he’d wanted her to loosen up a little, throw out her rigidly uptight rule book, encourage her to be herself, to have a little unexpected fun.

The girl was like a tightly coiled spring of tension. Even her kiss had said that.

Ah, well, he’d sort through her dusty box for her, then take her out for lunch, coax that funny, lively original side of her to the surface.

With absolutely no kissing. He could be the better man. He could resist the temptation of Sophie…for her own good, of course.

He’d put out the fire he was feeling by giving his attention to the kind of stuff she did. If she’d been wrong that he was bored in Sugar Maple Grove—and she had been—the truth was that nobody was more surprised than him. He’d been here nearly two whole days and wasn’t climbing the walls yet?

But the box she’d given him to sort through promised to change that!

Much as Brand appreciated that she had not been lured by the temptations of a glitzy world, he couldn’t help but think, no wonder Sophie was so ready for a little excitement.

The box of so-called memorabilia contained things someone thought were important to the history of Sugar Maple Grove.

He forced himself to focus. He began to scan scraps of paper and old photos.

There were newspaper cuttings of the high-school basketball team making the state finals in 1972, faded color photos of the work team from Holy Trinity Church that had built an orphanage in Honduras in the eighties. There was a whitish-gray plaster mold of a hand that said Happy Mother’s Day on the front, and on the back, in pen, Terry Wilson. Died Vietnam, 1969.

Brand had been dealing with subtle and not so subtle forms of evil for four years. For some reason, it felt as though this box immersed him in good, in the plain living of people with small-town values and humble ambitions.

To leave the world better.

No wonder Sophie had ended up here, at the Historical Society, documenting what made a small town tick.

There were several random items, including recipes and an old garter, possibly from a wedding.

And then, in the very bottom of the box, he found a packet of letters, tied up with a frayed black velvet ribbon.

Was this the gem of Second World War memorabilia he was supposed to be hunting for? Brand untied the ribbon, and plucked the first fragile letter out of the bundle. The envelope was addressed in a careful masculine hand to Miss Sarah Sorlington, General Delivery, Sugar Maple Grove. The return address was Private Sinclair Horsenell, a censor’s heavy black pen blotting out the rest. But the postmark was February of 1942.

Pay dirt, he thought. Was this how Sophie got her thrills? It was kind of thrilling.

He carefully unfolded the letter from the young private. The paper was fragile along the fold marks, and the ink had begun to fade in places. Still, Brand was able to discern that Sinclair Horsenell had just disembarked in Ireland, part of the U.S. Army V Corps, the first Americans to deploy overseas.

“My dearest Sarah,” he read, “what an extraordinary adventure I find myself on!”

The letter was beautifully descriptive of the lushness of Ireland, describing sights and sounds, camaraderie, funny incidents around the camp.

Despite all the new things I am seeing, and the grave sense of purpose I feel, the rightness of my being here, I miss you so deeply. I think of that last afternoon we spent and the picnic you prepared, the blue of your eyes matching the blue of the sky, and I feel both that I want to be with you, and that I want to be part of protecting the simple pleasures we were able to enjoy that afternoon. My darling, I am prepared to give my life for the protection of all that we hold dear.

I know you wanted to marry before I left, but that is not what I wanted for you. You deserve so much more than a rushed ceremony. I live to see you in a white dress, floating down the aisle toward me, a bouquet of forget-me-nots to match your eyes.

Wait for me, sweet Sarah. Wait.

Yours forever,

Sinclair

The letters had been carefully saved in their chronological order and Brand soon saw that Sinclair wrote faithfully, sometimes just a line or two, sometimes long letters. As the time passed, Brand noticed the excitement waning, giving way to the tedium of military life. Now the letters held occasional complaints about the lack of action, the officers, the terrible food.

The letter made Brand think, sadly, that things didn’t change. Young men went away to war, and left sweethearts behind them.

“Did you find something?”

Things didn’t change, but people did.

Sophie stood in the doorway, watching him, and he put away the letter he was reading.

Why did he feel reluctant to let her know what he had found? Because those letters were making him feel something. Uneasy.

“Just some old letters. They might have value. I haven’t finished reading them yet. Bitsy is probably better qualified than me to decide what has historical value, but I’m willing to go out on a limb and guess these two items don’t.”

He handed her the recipe for Corn Flakes casserole and the garter.

She laughed, and it was a good sound. Not a girlish giggle, but genuine. He was unaware how he had longed for genuine things until he heard it. It pulled him toward her like a beacon guiding a fisherman lost in a fog.

“Are you ready for lunch?” she asked.

There was something shy in that, his old Sophie, not the girl she had tried to convince him she was when she had kissed him. This Sophie’s laughter was so genuine it made him ache.

Brand glanced at his watch, amazed at how much time had gone by. Somehow the genuineness in her, coupled with the genuineness of the emotion in Sinclair’s letters made him feel bad about playing with Sophie’s world.

He didn’t want to have lunch with her and look at her lips and be the kind of guy who plotted another taste of them.

“You know what?” he said. “You were probably right. Let’s follow your schedule. I’ll see you tomorrow night after supper. We’ll ride our bikes down Main Street, go for ice cream. It will be a highly visible activity that the whole town can see.”

She stared at him. Disappointed? Annoyed?

That was good, he tried to tell himself. If they were going to carry off this courtship thing with no one getting hurt, it would be for the best if she found him disappointing and annoying.

“I’ll take these with me,” he said, gathering up the letters. “And get them back to you when I’m finished going through them.”

Why did he feel that he had to protect her from the letters? They were just sweet letters a young, heartsick man had written home.

For some reason, Brand wanted to make sure they had a happy ending.

As though he needed to protect her if they didn’t.

He had a feeling this desire to protect Sophie was going to do nothing but get him in trouble. Especially since it was now evident this was a more complicated mission than he had first perceived.

He had to protect her from himself and his reaction to her hunger.

“See you tomorrow,” he said breezily. “Are you still a purely vanilla girl?”

“You think I’m really boring,” she said.

Her lips had already told him there was a secret side to her that was anything but boring, but he was determined he wasn’t going there.

He thought of the world he had lived in for four years, where God forbid anybody should ever be bored, and so they had become adept at manufacturing all the excitement money could buy. And become so addicted to it, they were prepared to do anything to keep a lifestyle they had not legitimately earned, were not legitimately entitled to.

He thought of the letters in his hand, letters from a young man who was probably beginning to yearn for all those things he had once called boring.

“Don’t,” he told Sophie sternly, moving by her, the letters in his hand, “say boring as if it’s a bad thing.”

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