He's the One: Winning a Groom in 10 Dates / Molly Cooper's Dream Date / Mr Right There All Along

“I don’t know, exactly. Something was missing.”

“Well, then you’re a smart girl for calling it off.”

“Do you really think so?”

“Really.” Even he was surprised by how much he meant that. “You know, your parents were good, good people. They really loved each other, Sophie. Maybe you felt desperate to have what you had lost.”

She looked stunned. He was a little shocked himself. Where had that observation come from?

“Ah, well,” she said, looking away, finally, “I’m just on my way to work, but I thought I should let you know I’ve formalized the plan.”

She looked faintly relieved that there were actually neat papers in her hand, an escape from the intensity of the moment and the understanding that had just passed between them.

“I was just going to drop them in the mailbox, but since you’re here—

Deliciously flustered, she thrust several sheets of neatly folded paper at him and ducked back through the hedge.

“You didn’t say he was bleeding,” her grandmother scolded in German. “A little first aid!”

“It wasn’t life-threatening,” Sophie said. “I’m late for work.”

“I fear you are hopeless,” her grandmother muttered.

He unfolded the sheets Sophie had handed him and sighed. He feared her grandmother might be right.

Under the boldface heading, Courtship Itinerary, Sophie had typed a neat schedule for their romance. It was obviously an effort to keep their arrangement all business, which a part of him applauded, though a different part became fiendishly more committed to shaking her safe librarian/historian world.

Tuesday: 7:00 p.m., bike to Maynard’s, ice cream.

Friday: 7:30 p.m., movie at the old Tivoli.

Sunday: 3:00 p.m., swim at Blue Rock, weather permitting.

For a man who had taken weekend trips to Monte Carlo to gamble, attended yacht parties on unbelievably outfitted luxury craft, who had been wined and dined in some of the most famous restaurants in the world, her plan should have been laughable. This is what she had come up with for excitement?

This was the courtship of Miss Sophie?

But oddly, Brand didn’t feel like laughing. He felt as if he was choking on something. The choices not made, a sweet way of life left behind.

He shuffled papers. The second sheet, also neatly typed and double-spaced, had the boldface title, Courtship Guidelines. As he scanned it, he realized it really meant Sophie’s rules, starting with no public demonstrations of affection and ending with the request that he not call her Sweet Pea.

“Oh, lady,” he said, crumpling up the rules, needing to regain his equilibrium, “you have so much to learn.”

Or maybe he did. Maybe he was being given a chance to experience a choice not made a long time ago. Maybe it would be kind of fun to pretend to have the life he had walked away from.

Whistling, aware he felt inordinately happy despite the fact he was dancing with danger of a new kind—ah, well, danger had always held an irresistible pull for him—Brand worked a bit longer in the roses and then took the rose clippers to where the sweet peas were running riot along his father’s back fence.

Though his mother had loved roses, Brand had always considered the sweet pea the loveliest flower she grew, in all its abundant and delicate pastel shades, the fragrance coming off those cheery blossoms like a little piece of heaven.

An overlooked flower, he thought, scorned by the serious gardeners who babied their roses and clipped their rhododendron bushes and pulled their dahlias in the fall.

Just like Sophie Holtzheim.

An overlooked flower.

When he’d clipped more sweet peas than he could hold in his arms, he went and filled the kitchen sink with water and dropped them in.

“What are you doing with my flowers?” his father asked grumpily, glancing up from his paper. His father apparently hadn’t noticed there was nothing for breakfast in the house.

“I’m going to start a rumor,” Brand said pleasantly. “And then I’m going to get some groceries. You want to come?”

“To start the rumor?” his father said hopefully.

“No, for the groceries. How come you don’t have any food?”

“Why? You writing a report for your sister?”

“She’s worried about you, Dad. You don’t have to see her as the enemy. That fire rattled her.”

“Rattled her! What do you think it did to me? Oh well, I didn’t like cooking here anyway. Or eating here,” Dr. Sheridan said, proud, reluctant. “It makes me miss your mother.”

“I miss her, too, Dad. I come in this kitchen and think of strawberry lemonade and cookies warm from the oven, the chocolate chips dripping.”

Something in his father’s face softened, and, briefly, it almost felt that they might have a moment, share some fond memories. But his father rattled the paper and dove behind it.

Brand headed for the shower.

Later he went out to the bike shed, and found his mother’s bike, complete with the basket which he filled with sweet peas until it overflowed. Then he rode right down Main Street, enjoying the pretense of being a small-town guy who had never, for the good of his country, done things that ate at his soul.

The thing that astonished him was how easy it was to slip from who he knew himself to be—a hardened warrior, heart of ice—into this role of a young man going to woo his girl.

Had he gotten that adept at playing roles?

At least this one had no grim, dark overtones. It just felt fun. It would be entertaining, fill up some of his time here, to play this game with Sophie. To break her rules, too.

Maybe, if nothing else, before he left here, he could teach Sophie to be spontaneous, though he doubted if he had enough time to tackle that particular challenge.

He parked the bicycle in front of the old two-story redbrick Edwardian building that housed the Historical Society, gathered the sweet peas in his arms, took the steps two at a time and stopped in front of the stern-faced woman at the reception desk in the outer office.

“I’m looking for my sweet pea,” he announced, “Miss Sophie.”

That would show Sophie Holtzheim just how sick and tired he was of other people making the rules that governed his life. He was on leave from his military duties. He wasn’t taking orders from a little scrap of a girl!

Not unless they were the delicious kind. The librarian pulling her glasses off, chewing thoughtfully on the arm, watching him with heat in her eyes.

Brand Sheridan, he berated himself, there is a special place in hell for guys like you.

On second thought, he was already there.