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
