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
