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?
