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
