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.
“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
